Powerwall 2: Technical

[JeffreyY]

Installed today! First, background:

1. The concrete slab used to be for a shed. Then it was used for garbage cans. Now, it's getting dual use.
2. The exterior conduit was my unlucky choice, for expedience, due to unusual site parameters; most installations would have more options to hide all the conduit; routing it through the interior of the wall was possible for me, for a no-conduit installation, but it would have required extensive interior work, including moving storage that was set aside in a finished space in the garage; that whole project to hide 15 feet of pipe would take about a week. I may do it within a few years, but I'm not in a huge hurry. Note that only one conduit goes to the PowerWall. (Also pictured is the conduit sticking out for the HPWC; that was against my wishes, and I would also like to put the labor in someday necessary to route that via the interior. The main limitation is that little circuit breaker box; I'd have to make a new hole in it, or replace it with another with such a hole.)
   
3. They also installed the exterior switch box that connects to the main service panel with the PG&E meter (no backup).
4. He rerouted my existing solar installation away from the main panel and into the secondary (backed up) panel. Note that my existing solar installation was installed by a local installer and has a SolarEdge on it, so no issues there connecting that AC to the AC PowerWalls; it does mean loss DC->AC->DC, though. (And if charging an electric car at night via HPWC, then DC->AC->DC->AC->DC, then finally ->AC to the car motors to use them. Quite a journey of conversions!)
   
5. I specified backup as a secondary objective, with primary objective being load shift from solar to evening use.
6. After the below pictures, I chose 30% reserved. I'll have to read the manual and watch the flows to figure out better settings.
7. Working with the installation person (electrician) was enjoyable; he's been 10 years in the trade and 4 years with Solar City. He worked alone (except for cleanup when someone came in I presume from another nearby job to help). He arrived at 9AM, talked with me on the phone basically confirming everything Engineering said (I was at work all day until 5:30PM and left notes everywhere), and I labeled everything so it was easy for him. He finished by around 6:15PM. I found SolarCity to be quite straightforward and easy to work with once I understood their basic foo; of course, I had a few years to learn that foo.
8. Providing network for it was easy, since I bought a Netgear 8 port switch for $60 on Amazon, and installed it a few nights before SolarCity installation to an existing Ethernet outlet I put in the garage back in 2003.
9. Everything was completely installed from beginning to finish in one day by one installer as described above (except 20 minutes of cleanup with a second installer). I was already configuring it in my app before they were finished cleaning up. Everything went smoothly as far as that's concerned.
10. After testing, they said that labeling and inspection will come at a later date. I don't know if that's another scheduled event. I'll try to stay on top of any aspect of it that I need to handle.
11. He mimicked power outage twice; both times, the whole house and all of its various electronics (including computers, networks, etc.) stayed on 100%; the switchover is very fast. I don't know how fast.

Anybody who follows my posts will know that I am (usually) quick to criticize and/or praise. I have to say that I am very pleasantly surprised with how smoothly everything went, with the number of things that worked right, had the right answer, and just happened. I didn't really have to worry about much of anything. This is proving that these batteries are going to be a breeze to install (once they smooth out any other bumps leading up to install day). The engineering specifications in my case were right, and seemed to work out well. And finally, the product is nice and does what it's supposed to.

After all, it's a battery.

Now, they need to find a way to get a good installation experience into the hands of more people.

And, I need to work on emptying out that storage area of the garage and getting that conduit run rerouted inside (my hassle).
Now, pictures:

View attachment 236738 View attachment 236739 View attachment 236740 View attachment 236741 View attachment 236742View attachment 236744 View attachment 236743

Thanks so much for the pics! Is the big grey box the gateway? If so, is there a chance you can take a pic with something else for scale / reference? Hard to tell how big it is with it occupying the whole pic. Thanks again!

Solar City / Tesla came over and did the survey at my house today btw.

Jeff

 

[Ulmo]

& now:

Tesla app:

Closeup of b&w LCD PG&E meter showing 0kW:

SolarEdge app:

Tesla app:

These graphs remind me of wk057.solar by @wk057. However, his solar system does 225kWh per day, compared to my 38kWh; six times mine. Plus, his does air conditioning, and two electric vehicles charging, things I don't currently have.

I want a way to log all this data.

 

[ohmman]

I want a way to log all this data.

Splunk is a very easy way to visualize and analyze disparate logs, create alerts, etc. It's available for free for a limited personal license. Visualizations are pretty out of the box if you've got minor technical skills, and go up from there. Samples below. Looks like I had a time of day issue on July 4th. But you get the idea.

 

[Ulmo]

Splunk is a very easy way to visualize and analyze disparate logs, create alerts, etc. It's available for free for a limited personal license. Visualizations are pretty out of the box if you've got minor technical skills, and go up from there. Samples below. Looks like I had a time of day issue on July 4th. But you get the idea.

View attachment 237050
View attachment 237051

How do I get the Powerball 2 information into that system?

My update now is that I found the graph menu button in the app. Before I left the house for work, I turned off my heater but I also turned on my dryer for an hour.

 

[Ulmo]

My bug report for Tesla app graphs:

Dear Tesla PowerWall app architects,

The PowerWall usage history graphs are not correctly oriented: the set of {Grid, Solar, Battery} have outward from core down and inward to core up, but Home has outward from core up and inward from core down. Please fix this as soon as possible. Either put all inwards down (which would leave house up, and flip solar down, and flips current grid and battery orientations), or all outwards down (which would only flip house down and leave the rest as is).

Which direction? Considering it's for battery product, I suppose I think flipping Grid, Battery & Solar would be best: the solar would point down when sun is coming in, and battery would point up while charging. Grid would point up once the battery is charged and solar exceeds use. Grid and battery would point down when they were respectively being used as sources of electricity, just like solar.

Or, try it the other way.

But the current method has House upside down, or the other three, one way or the other.

---

Here's some examples:

The early spike to 6kW use was the clothes dryer. I never hit grid use nevertheless.

 

[ohmman]

If you haven't been able to tell, tapping and holding on a portion of the graph will tell you the usage/production at that snapshot in time. This works for the "today" or "yesterday" graphs.

For instance:

 

[Ulmo]

So, here's Net Demand at CAISO for right now; notice that it's still relatively high usage, meaning that we aren't fulfilling the purpose of solar power being clean (if we do as @miimura suggests and use energy from the grid at cheapest times, something that's pretty much guaranteed to be one of the biggest use patterns for PowerWall owners who also have Solar Power and Electric Vehicles, because not everyone sizes their solar power and battery systems to fully charge their cars): this is because the rate plans from the utilities and the regulators don't really fully take this into consideration. This might change over the next 5-10 years pretty significantly, or it might not. I really hope it does change. Basically, the cost patterns should not reward us for using peak energy and peak dirty energy at low rates. Part of this will be driven by even more solar power installed by utilities and on customer side of meters; as PowerWall and competing batteries make it to market, they will be ever more attractive to utilities to take advantage of in the rate structures, rewarding us for maximizing clean energy use through the use of shifting the solar (and wind) peaks to the other utilization times of day. What's our prediction? 7 years for that to come to the rate plans?

 

[Ulmo]

As an aside, my very latest update with my experience is I tried for a time to put my PowerWalls back into discharging mode, by lowering the backup reserve % to under the charge level %, but that did not do anything, even after waiting for half an hour. I will now attempt to mimic a power outage to see if that has an effect.

So, here's what happened: First, some background: earlier, I had shut off my battery discharge while drying my clothes by putting the Backup Reserve to 99% when the battery was at 100%, so as soon as it dropped to 99%, it started pulling from grid ("Standby" mode). Then, after finishing drying my clothes, I moved the Backup Reserve back down in order to make it start powering my house from battery again ("Discharge" mode), but I noticed that after 45 minutes, the battery still had not restarted its discharge. Here's photos that show the state at that step (notice the "Standby" indicating the mode):

I then decided to mimic a power outage.

I was standing next to lights (on the backed-up portion of the switch) when I opened the PG&E breaker: the Tesla switch box made a big *clunk!*, and the lights did not flicker at all.

Here's what the app showed after this (notice the "Backup" text indicating the mode):

Notice a few things in the app: first of all, the app gets a very distinctive orange border during backup operations: I think that's to alert you that you are only operating on backup, which has its limitations, very specific to your setup. In my case, that would mean all the house use would have to fit on the output of my two PowerWalls, with two times the specifications of "7kW peak / 5kW continuous", so 14kW peak and 10kW continuous, which at 245VAC would be 40 amps continuous (80 amps continuous for 122VAC), far lower than my 200 amp service provides*.

I regret the arcing damage that test did into the main breaker. Bad!

Then, this is what happened when I closed the breaker again (turning back on PG&E): first, I waited, and almost a dozen seconds later, I heard the *clunk!* from the Tesla switch box, and once again, no lights flickered, and this is what the app then showed:

In Backup History list, I gained one Event, of 1 minute, with no particular time other than "Today" indicated:

I checked all my computers, and they were all on, and all of them were in good status when I checked what they were doing; all of them had processes that would have been clobbered due to a power outage, and nothing was clobbered. My Internet which takes an infamous five minutes or so to restart on good days (many times longer on bad days) is still 100% up. This switch is fast, at least fast enough for any practical use to keep working just fine, in my experience, and that's exactly what the installer implied in fewer words; he said "it's so fast it won't have any effect".

This was a very successful backup test, and complete failure to trigger the batteries to discharge back into the home. Score 0 points on this round for user control and ability to adjust them to the settings of the situation. We knew this when we had it installed; they said they would incrementally add in those necessary features with time via software upgrades. Let's hope this isn't Autopilot-style vaporware; everything else shows very high quality, so messing it up by not bringing the product to the finish line would be asinine.

* I do not know yet if their installation reduced my subpanel amperage below its initial 200 amps. I plan to open it up to investigate when I have time.

 

[Ulmo]

This was a very successful backup test, and complete failure to trigger the batteries to discharge back into the home.

Update:

Now it's Discharging.

I wonder what triggered it?

The app flow graphs are no help: they apparently are smoothed, and show inaccurate data, conflicting with the timing of my last post even. Proof of that:

Notice the crossing legs as they switch back and forth. In reality, it's a sudden switch. And, as @ohmman pointed out, if I press and hold on the graph, it shows an instant in time graph, and that is wrong too; it showed impossible values for when the PG&E was completely off and immediately before it.

Maybe the battery started discharging right away and the app didn't show it for 45 minutes; maybe the app is showing smoothed data that is wrong. Maybe both are true. It appears Discharge resumed after my Backup test.

All in all, I'm extremely impressed with the quality and performance of the PowerWall 2 hardware and Switch hardware, the ease of installation, and the beauty of the equipment. I want this to succeed, and I'm elated that the hardware is up to the task as far as I can tell. The software team seems like it's on the ball, even though it seems to be a little bit trying to play catch up for something we've known about for all our lives (at least those of us who studied this issue when we were young).

We can all expect at least some teething issues with the hardware even though by all initial experiences it seems to be functioning fully well. I'm fully prepared for that to be a 10 to 15 year process to shake out all the hardware bugs. But, this PowerWall 2 seems to be a very mature step in that direction; they are far better than the UPS's of the 1980s by leaps and bounds. The fact that this is their 2nd generation of this product means that they're already a few years into that 10-15 year process, and we can count the experience of the many decades past in their current designs, so in many ways, they may be even deeper into that 10-15 years process. I would be very pleased if this product stands the test of time as is. This is a key product in the Tesla lineup, so I would be entirely unsurprised to find out that they have done their homework, due diligence, thorough prudent testing, and come up with a released hardware product that actually is already of refined reliable quality. We know that we don't know that yet, but all indications so far are that it could well be that, or close to that in most situations. (For instance, it might work great in California weather, but not be specified for Antarctica*, exterior North Canada winters*, exterior use in Saudi Arabia sand storms**, or exterior use in tropical jungle rain forests. However, if I worked there, I'd spec and test it for that and Mars & moon, too, depending on the additional costs.)

* In fact, it is not; it clearly states "Operating Temperature -4°F to 122°F / -20°C to 50°C"; it would need additional air conditioning (for instance, inside a conditioned equipment room) for this environment; this is common with a lot of equipment, so I'm sure these places are used to dealing with this issue.
** In fact, it is not; the manual clearly states that it must be kept clear of debris and dirt (so, again, inside a properly air filtered equipment room); once again, those areas are probably well equipped to handle this issue already.

It seems to me logically that extreme environments for this equipment can be simply solved by placing the Tesla PowerWall equipment (switches and batteries) inside of appropriately properly air conditioned and/or air filtered equipment rooms to compensate for whatever extreme out-of-spec exterior environments might be present in super-extreme parts of the geography of our planet. For instance, in Saudi Arabia which has extreme heat and extreme sand, it could have appropriate air filtering heat pumps that are sufficient for that environment, or even not exchange air at all but just temperature, closing out the exterior air completely. There is a bit of a chicken and egg problem there: the battery must work in order to operate the conditioning equipment; the conditioning equipment must work for the battery to operate; both must be turned on when conditions are closer to normal, and keep each other symbiotically happy. High reliability installations would probably contain a network of redundant backups of sorts; multiple batteries, multiple switchgear, and multiple conditioning setups, with no single points of failure. For domestic USA needs and most of the world, almost none of these extremes exist and almost none of the additional expense of redundancy is necessary.

 

[miimura]

Then, this is what happened when I closed the breaker again (turning back on PG&E): first, I waited, and almost a dozen seconds later, I heard the *clunk!* from the Tesla switch box, and once again, no lights flickered, and this is what the app then showed:

This delay is needed so that the Powerwall can make sure that the grid is stable and in-phase. It will reconnect only when it is in phase so that there is no discontinuity. This should be much smoother than when you cut it off because there is inherently no voltage difference and hence no current flowing through the transfer switch when it connects the grid back in.

 

[Ulmo]

These clips sometimes come off, or get sideways; you can take them off, or sometimes leave them in place, and then re-orient them straight. The first picture is one which is properly attached.

They clip back in to the case; notice the tab with a hole in the top; there's more on the sides and bottom (not in picture). Both sides have this system.

The cutout slips in with a seating point; I properly slipped it in (I have no idea why SolarCity slipped it off; did they do a thorough inspection of the workmanship?)

The shipping and installation handles to pull these off come off.

There is an access tab on the bottom to get to another handle tucked inside; that tab stays permanently tucked inside until you need it and you can get at it via that tab to pull off that cover.

The other side with the light doesn't have an internal access tab; nevertheless, I took out their shipping pullout. I also fixed all the clips and took out this bump that SolarCity caused this afternoon when they came by to "document".

Today SolarCity came by to do additional documentation, and didn't clip everything back in place fully, which is what caused me to take it off and re-clip it properly.

This is an excellent time for the company to stay on the ball and check its work, see how it is proceeding, and be fully awake as it establishes its procedures. I'm very excited with their company progress.

I noticed they bypassed my 200 amp breaker to my sub-panel, and replaced it with a 100 amp breaker to their switch; I can't swear, but I'm almost certain this was one the points of their call to me, to tell me the backup panel will only be 100 amp (did he say from the grid, or total?). They also moved the solar into the backed up subpanel. Also, the two PowerWalls each get their own 30 amp breaker inside the subpanel. So, what used to be a 200 amp breaker is now a 100 amp breaker (rated at ? continuous) + two PowerWalls (5kW continuous each) + the solar array (usually maxing out at 5kW); as far as I can tell, that means the total is more than 100 amps (closer to 162 amps).

200 amps at 240 volts is 200*240 watts, or 48*1000W=48,000W, or 48kW. They replaced it with 24kW + 15kW = 39kW. What I want to know:

• If I exceed 24kW use in the subpanel, what happens? Does it use battery?
• If I exceed solar + battery in the subpanel, what happens? Does it use grid?

I presume it uses all 3 up to their respective maximums. I wonder what the cutoff point is.

That 4kWh I put to grid last night for the dryer added 15% to the total battery left when charging, so more went to grid from the solar.

Also, for some reason, my single GPU cryptocurrency miner heater gives more efficient heating of my room by running all day than running an electric heater just at night; perhaps it's because it gets straight sun + solar electric during the day all day (soaking the whole room in heat), rather than depleting the battery at night, thus making it both more efficient and taking away from grid sellback more than it does from battery level. That makes sense.

While taking my shower, I realized that what @miimura said about using nighttime grid power and selling solar back to the grid in the day is the same amount of solar power is currently fairly true since fossil fuels run at both time periods, but in the future, the only way to stop the fossil fuel plants will be to discharge (mostly sun-sourced) storage at night plus some clean energy that runs at night (earth, water, and wind).

My car charger (HPWC) is not on the backed up subpanel; it's on the main service panel on the outside of the Tesla backup switch; the car charger doesn't get fed anything from the battery; it would only get excess solar not taken by the battery. It mostly would get energy straight from PG&E, while the battery would supply the house other (mostly less) household amounts of household electricity. I could supply all of the backed up panel with electricity all day and night from purely solar power when I have enough solar, and keep all of the car charging on PG&E EV-A lowest rate times of day; in that case, the battery would not be shifting power. In the future, I could either pay for an additional switch to back up the main panel separately (two battery banks) so I could shift EV use (and designate a different set of parameters via the different switch and battery bank, even), or just turn the switch and battery into a whole house switch and add more batteries and pool all the energy for car and home.


So far, I'm loving it.

 

[Ulmo]

This delay is needed so that the Powerwall can make sure that the grid is stable and in-phase. It will reconnect only when it is in phase so that there is no discontinuity. This should be much smoother than when you cut it off because there is inherently no voltage difference and hence no current flowing through the transfer switch when it connects the grid back in.

Interesting thought based on your interesting statement at the end: when power goes out or brown:

• Power goes out: transfer switch essentially is just a disconnect switch, disconnecting PG&E so the batteries don't back-feed it. Any ramp up is from the batteries and inverters, which must go instant-on (solid state?). Since PG&E is disconnected, another switch disconnecting it won't cause its own current change.
  
• Power goes brown: the transfer switch really is causing a dive as it gets off the brown power and goes to battery; less of a clean switch.

 

[miimura]

Interesting thought based on your interesting statement at the end: when power goes out or brown:

• Power goes out: transfer switch essentially is just a disconnect switch, disconnecting PG&E so the batteries don't back-feed it. Any ramp up is from the batteries and inverters, which must go instant-on (solid state?). Since PG&E is disconnected, another switch disconnecting it won't cause its own current change.
  
• Power goes brown: the transfer switch really is causing a dive as it gets off the brown power and goes to battery; less of a clean switch.

In theory, as soon as the Powerwall detected that the grid was sagging, it could try to immediately zero the current at the transfer switch by supplying power to match the connected loads and then cut it off, minimizing any arcing.

 

[mr blue sky]

The electrical inspection happened a few days ago, and the inspector was not happy with the standard ethernet cable being run in the same conduit as the electrical. The inspector said it was supposed to be 600V rated cable (i.e., not the standard type) to be up to code. He did end up signing off on the permit, but I contacted Tesla and they will be sending someone out to change the ethernet cabling to be up to code.

The other problem I have been having is that currently the neurio power monitor that is connected to my solar isn't working since it seems that these connect wirelessly via wifi to the gateway. Unfortunately the gateway's antenna is not very sensitive and in fact sits inside of the electrical box... basically inside of a faraday cage. I did a bunch of troubleshooting to try to use a more powerful antenna on the neurio unit and a wifi repeater, but currently it appears the software only allows a direct connection of the neurio unit.

The interesting thing I discovered and this is probably why they are pushing for an ethernet based connection for the gateway is that it seems if your gateway uses a wifi connection, it will switch back and forth between connecting to your home wireless unit to transit information and creating a wifi network for the neurio units to join in order to receive the information. It does seem a little crazy that these don't use some sort of data over powerline to communicate like the sun power solar monitor that was installed with my panels.

But currently the energy gateway software gets a little confused since my kW usage is negative during the day due to solar, but without the neurio solar monitor connected the system doesn't think I have solar.

In case anyone was wondering the password for the gateway is your gateway's serial number. You can commission and uncommission your own unit which basically allows you to add/remove neurio monitors and set the solar system size, but that's about it. You can use any e-mail address when logging in. It's not really useful. The gateway itself seems to have ssh installed but it is protected via public/private key only so probably no easy way to log into that directly.

In case anyone else runs into signal problems I was able to get an increased signal from the neurio unit using a larger directional antenna with a Tupavco Panel Wifi antenna ($40, Amazon.com: Panel WiFi Antenna - 2.4GHz/5GHz-5.8GHz Range - 13dBi - Dual Band/Multi Band - Outdoor - Directional - Wireless Antenna (2400-2500/5150-5850MHz) - TP542 ...: Computers & Accessories) and a N-Male to RP-SMA cable ($15, Amazon.com: TP-Link TL-ANT24PT3 3m/10ft N Male to RP-SMA Male Pigtail Cable: Computers & Accessories). Unfortunately my distance is simply too far until they fix the gateway software to allow connection through a wifi repeater, allow the neurio unit to connect to the gateway through my home network, or support RS-485 so I can use an ethernet bridge for it.

 

[zedkyuu]

That's interesting re the gateway password being my serial number. I wonder if I can see some other stats if I provide it. There are numerous /api/ endpoints visible in the gateway webserver JS but many of them require auth. In particular, I can't scrape battery SOC right now and that would be really handy.

I haven't poked around the inside of the unit yet. What do you mean by Neurio units? Is there something else in there we can play with?

 

[zedkyuu]

Also, I haven't looked in awhile, so I need to go through the big posts that happened recently, but one thing I've thought a bit about is what happens in an extended outage when you exhaust your battery. You get a double-whammy at that point:

• Your solar panels need to see AC voltage before they'll generate, but if your battery is out, then you can't get AC voltage out of it.
• If the system is jump-started somehow (e.g. something tells the batteries that solar generation is feasible and they dump some reserve battery capacity in order to get the panels going again, or you plug in a generator, or something), then your panels need to generate enough to run whatever'll turn on in your house at that moment. Otherwise, you get a brown-out and you're back to the same problem.

For me, the solar panels and Powerwalls are on a separate breaker panel that feeds into the backup gateway separately from the main breaker panel. I don't know anything about the details of the system architecture, but I could dream up something silly like the backup gateway isolating the main breaker panel from the panels and batteries and leaving just the panels powered until the sun rose and they produced enough power to charge the batteries above a certain reserve point. That might be the most sensible way to go. Unfortunately, to test this theory, I'd need to produce my own extended outage and I'm pretty sure I don't want to.

 

[mr blue sky]

What do you mean by Neurio units? Is there something else in there we can play with?

Sorry I forgot that if you aren't paying close attention or have opened up your electrical panel, you wouldn't have seen these. The way the powerwall knows the power consumption of the home and the amount of power generated by the panels versus internal consumption is by two clamp power monitors made by a company called nuerio.

These are the same units made for the general consumer. It seems during the commissioning process the gateway accesses these devices and tells them to connect to the gateway's wifi network (the password also being your serial number). Then I guess the gateway must read these devices. When I took a look at the device it seemed like they had a special version of the firmware for tesla. But once I commissioned the unit I couldn't read any info off the device directly anymore.

 

[Ulmo]

In theory, as soon as the Powerwall detected that the grid was sagging, it could try to immediately zero the current at the transfer switch by supplying power to match the connected loads and then cut it off, minimizing any arcing.

Yes, of course. I don't know why I even thought the prior thought, other than old age.

So, I was poking around my Tesla MyTesla, and I noticed that I can't go to a specific screen for each of the Model 3's reserved any more. My PowerWall screen says "MANAGE" but then just says "Cancel order" or allows me to adjust house size and needs. Does this ever update to the installed PowerWalls?

 

[Ulmo]

Sorry I forgot that if you aren't paying close attention or have opened up your electrical panel, you wouldn't have seen these. The way the powerwall knows the power consumption of the home and the amount of power generated by the panels versus internal consumption is by two clamp power monitors made by a company called nuerio.

These are the same units made for the general consumer. It seems during the commissioning process the gateway accesses these devices and tells them to connect to the gateway's wifi network (the password also being your serial number). Then I guess the gateway must read these devices. When I took a look at the device it seemed like they had a special version of the firmware for tesla. But once I commissioned the unit I couldn't read any info off the device directly anymore.

Thank you. This will make my first look in to the panels to see what they did to them much more informed.

I forgot that I gave the thing a static IP number on my LAN. After reading some of your posts, I remembered. Apparently, it has some open ports, chief among them port 80. Here's a screenshot.

I have no idea who the Lead Installer email is. Is that in the serial number sheet they gave us? I'll check sometime more thoroughly; I'm about to sleep.

Meanwhile, it is abundantly apparent to me that there is some ability to pull down my stats somehow. At first, it said "not connected to Tesla" and showed no stats; are they cooked by the Mothership in Fremont or Palo Alto?

 

[mr blue sky]

I have no idea who the Lead Installer email is. Is that in the serial number sheet they gave us? I'll check sometime more thoroughly; I'm about to sleep.

This is the sign in for commissioning/uncommissioning your unit. You can enter any e-mail address here. The password is your serial number for the gateway. Note if you log in here and continue your unit will become uncommissioned and you will have to go through the entire wizard to commission it again. There's actually not really anything interesting in there, you can just adjust the number of nuer.io monitors and the PV size setting (not sure what that affects). Also you can change what network it is connected to if you wanted to use wifi instead of ethernet.