Planned Power Outages

[solardudesf]

We have a lengthy planned power outage tomorrow. Our home has two Powerwalls. It was my understanding that the powerwalls are supposed to be charged from the grid using the “storm watch” for situations like this. I thought that PGE informed Tesla of these events. However that has not happened and our Powerwall could use quite a bit of juice before tomorrow.

There does look like a setting for me to manually turn on grid charging but the app warns me of tax implications. I guess when these events are planned I can’t count on Tesla and PGE to communicate? What should I do?

 

[dailo]

Next time you’ll want to set your reserve to 100% manually. Assuming you have solar and don’t think it will be able to charge your batteries and serve your house loads I’d just enable grid charging until your PW gets to like 80% and let your solar to the rest tomorrow. Obviously discuss it with your own tax consultant, but personally I am not worried about charging from the grid once in a while if I really need it. Not sure storm watch is really any different really.

 

[jjrandorin]

Stormwatch doesnt have anything to do with "planned power outages", so your understanding of that was incorrect. The page describing the stormwatch functionality (severe weather events), by Tesla, is here:

Storm Watch | Tesla Support

Storm Watch allows you to maximize savings by keeping a low backup reserve percentage in Self-Powered or Time-Based Control mode, while still having peace of mind that Powerwall will react in time to protect you during a severe weather event.

www.tesla.com

Since you knew about the power outage (it was planned, you said), the onus is on you to slide your reserve up to 100% in time enough to have the amount of backup power you want.

What should I do?

Depends on if you will have enough sun to run your house and charge your powerwalls tomorrow. If so, just slide your reserve to 100% and go about your business. If you are unsure, and have the availability in the Tesla app to charge from the grid, do that, if you wont have enough power for the planned outage.

If an event is planned, there is no reason to depend on anything but yourself in sliding the reserve to 100% (since stormwatch is not going to activate for a planned power outage).

 

[solardudesf]

Thanks! For some reason I thought it would happen automatically. My bad. Good to know for the future.

 

[C DM]

Thanks! For some reason I thought it would happen automatically. My bad. Good to know for the future.

It can in case of Storm Watch, which seems to be more related to NWS warnings and things of that nature. Electric company shut downs or something else along those lines don't appear to be part of those things that relate to Storm Watch (unless they happen to take place at the same time when NWS warnings that qualify for Storm Watch are also there).

 

[Matt-FL]

Personally, I monitor and manage my powerwalls myself instead of using stormwatch. Either I'm in a large zip code, or it isn't very accurate. I'd get a message about a coming storm, grid charge kicks on, but no storm. Or, I'd get a nasty storm come through and stormwatch wouldn't note it.

I just watch the weather or the rare notifications from my utility, and adjust reserve manually as needed. Maybe it has gotten better in the last 9 months since I turned it off.