I'll try turning all the breakers off except the Powerwalls and see if I can get them charged up and keep the solar system running before I turn anything else back on. Fortunately the gateway also had a cellular connection so I can monitor what's going on.
The water heater/boiler is naturally vented but relies on electrically operated control valves. I didn't see a way to turn them on manually. We do have a natural gas fireplace on the main floor which keeps that floor and the upper floor from getting too cold. Now I'm thinking we might need to put one in the walkout basement as well.
I have that a go but still no dice. The sun came up and I turned off all breakers to the house. I turned one of the Powerwalls off for a second to reset things and then turned on one inverter. It instantly synchronized and ran for a couple minutes and produced 30W at about 1800W before it reported External Events and then went back to trying to synchronize. I tried the smaller arrays too but got similar results. I'm going to wait a few minutes before checking again but it's 8 degrees F with the windchill today. Totally sunny though so if we can get it working, we should be able to charge the Powerwalls in a few hours.
The sad thing is that is Storm Watch had activated, we would've had 100 percent and made it until this morning or this afternoon. Since we had plenty of sun yesterday and today, I think they would've been able to charge if they were above the magical 5% {at least according to what others have said}.
Maybe I'm not reading it right, but this seems like a backwards approach. Why are they applying updates to the solar inverters when the Powerwalls are erroneously changing the frequency? IMHO, the Powerwalls should hold the frequency at 60.0Hz until they either approach some high percentage of charging power (like 80%) or some high state of charge (like 90%).
From what I understand, the Powerwalls might've had an issue since they were cold and at a low state of charge, down to add low as 2% at one time. I think this is why others have warned to not go below 6%, but I'm not certain.
If the Powerwalls had been operating properly (holding the frequency steady at 60.0Hz) at the beginning of the outage, they would not have fallen to low SOC to begin with. Also, as soon as the grid came back, they quickly started charging with more than 5kW of power.
Good point on the behavior upon power restoration, could part of that be their internal heaters though?
He did mention the internal heaters running. It wasn't that cold in the garage. Maybe 34 F, but I guess that would be cool for the batteries. I did hear the fans running on at least one of them.
