Power went out for 11 seconds

[Merrill]

Wondering why for the first time since Powerwall’s installed (March of this year) I got a beep and lost power on my computers, some clocks for 11 seconds. Nothing else went off, up to this point every time I lost power the powerwalls took over seamlessly. Any ideas what might of happened.

 

[aesculus]

This is a known issue and there is nothing you can do with the PWs to prevent it. There are at least two possible reasons:

• The Powerwall's were not supplying power in this case but were in your other cases. No transfer needed to take place because they were already supplying power. So no interruption. In this case there was probably a short delay when the transfer was made. It can be a fraction of a second but enough for sensitive devices to trip off.
• The Powerwall's needed to make a frequency adjustment to lower solar production because they were over 90% charged. They do this to limit solar production when there is no place to store/consume the energy.

If you don't want a possible interruption on sensitive devices like computers, you will have to back them up with a UPS. It only needs to cover a few minutes of backup time at best so nothing too big is required.

The other thing you should check out is the frequency your PWs are set at when they are full and disconnected from the grid. The default is 65 hz which will cause many sensitive devices to trip. Tesla Level 2 support can set them down to 62 or 62.5 Hz.

 

[Merrill]

Ok, just got notification from PG&E of a power outage til noon. I do have my powerwall’s set to the lower Hz.

 

[bmah]

I've seen this twice within 24 hours, a few months ago. We had a grid outage and it took my Powerwall system about 12 seconds to cut over each time. The usual behavior I've come to expect is to switch to batteries in less than a second (even if it's not completely seamless). I've had numerous outages over the past almost-three years, under varying conditions of load, battery state of charge, etc. and I've never experienced this before (or since, for that matter). All of my computers and networking gear are backed up on UPSs, which easily handled the few seconds of downtime until the Powerwalls picked up the load.

Both times this slow cut-over happened, I was on a Zoom call for work, and my coworkers were treated to seeing my room lights going out and me frantically looking around while still on camera to try to figure out WTF was going on, then the lights coming back up by themselves. I'm sure that was entertaining.

Bruce.

 

[Merrill]

I've seen this twice within 24 hours, a few months ago. We had a grid outage and it took my Powerwall system about 12 seconds to cut over each time. The usual behavior I've come to expect is to switch to batteries in less than a second (even if it's not completely seamless). I've had numerous outages over the past almost-three years, under varying conditions of load, battery state of charge, etc. and I've never experienced this before (or since, for that matter). All of my computers and networking gear are backed up on UPSs, which easily handled the few seconds of downtime until the Powerwalls picked up the load.

Both times this slow cut-over happened, I was on a Zoom call for work, and my coworkers were treated to seeing my room lights going out and me frantically looking around while still on camera to try to figure out WTF was going on, then the lights coming back up by themselves. I'm sure that was entertaining.

Bruce.

Thanks Bruce, so when PG&E shut off power I did not experience and switch over delay, they have restored power just now so I assume my glitch was when what ever caused the outage hopefully PG&E will let us know what caused the outage.

 

[bmah]

Thanks Bruce, so when PG&E shut off power I did not experience and switch over delay, they have restored power just now so I assume my glitch was when what ever caused the outage hopefully PG&E will let us know what caused the outage.

OK, I think I misinterpreted your original post. In any case, glad power is back up for you!

Bruce.

 

[Merrill]

OK, I think I misinterpreted your original post. In any case, glad power is back up for you!

Bruce.

I guess what I’m thinking is that what ever caused the outage at first ie a pole down or wires broken that is when I had the glitch then after that when PG&E discovered the problem they shut power off and no glitch.

 

[jjrandorin]

Any ideas what might of happened.

Most of what we know about powerwall changeover, etc is contained in this thread here:

How come power changeover was not seamless during power outage blip?

Well, this is interesting. Am sitting at my computer and the screen glitches. I get a text from my Ting line monitoring device that power has gone out, and then was restored "quickly". Looks like a transformer blew in the area, but we had a quick restore. Others are not without power. But...

teslamotorsclub.com

 

[charlesj]

I guess what I’m thinking is that what ever caused the outage at first ie a pole down or wires broken that is when I had the glitch then after that when PG&E discovered the problem they shut power off and no glitch.

If there was an equipment issue then PG&E shut it off to work on it, most likely there was confusing voltage and frequency on line with equipment getting ready to fail that would have cause the battery inverter to WTF is going on, cannot sync, etc. When power is just shut down by utility workers it is quick and done.

 

[bob_p]

We periodically see very brief outages reported by the gateway - usually 5 minutes.

When this happens - I can see that our neighbors still have power.

What's likely happening is that the Gateway detects something on the grid connection indicating the grid might be going down - so it disconnects from the grid - and if the grid power doesn't go down, waits for the 5 minute countdown timer to expire before reconnecting.

While a little annoying, these brief switchovers to solar/PowerWall power don't have any negative impact (since we have all critical devices run off UPS so they don't reboot during the switchover) - and actually provide a periodic test to ensure the system is working.