powerwall control during internet outage?

[astrorob]

one more pre-installation question from me:

presumably since the powerwall control is all cloud-based, what happens during a power outage if your internet goes down? is there a way to connect to the powerwall on your local network? does the gateway itself have a web server?

at least for me, in both PSPS events, comcast also bit the dust and despite having a UPS on my network gear, i had no internet during the outage.

i had been thinking about putting the gateway on its own VLAN which would complicate local control (if it exists) but of course i can work around that.

 

[bmah]

presumably since the powerwall control is all cloud-based, what happens during a power outage if your internet goes down? is there a way to connect to the powerwall on your local network? does the gateway itself have a web server?

The gateway has a Web server. You can access this on the local LAN, or on a private WiFi network that the gateway provides. HTTPS with a self-signed certificate. There's not a whole lot of control operations you can do, other than shut down the system or change the network configuration. It is however useful for monitoring battery levels.

There's also a REST API, accessible via the local LAN, not sure about the private WiFi network. I believe you can do some control operations with it, but I haven't really dinked around with it much (some people here have).

My Powerwall came with an LTE connection provisioned (I think that's fairly standard), so even if my Internet connection died, I could still access it with the app on my phone (assuming the local cell towers were also working, which was actually not the case for many people during last year's PG&E PSPS events).

Bruce.

 

[astrorob]

ah OK, i didn't realize it may come with cellular. we were on the edge of the PSPS and so cell service persisted however it was very slow and unreliable. it may have gotten worse as the days went by.

and yes, i was mainly interested in tracking the battery state to see how many days/hours of juice are left as the PSPS wears on.

thanks for the info!

 

[boaterva]

ah OK, i didn't realize it may come with cellular. we were on the edge of the PSPS and so cell service persisted however it was very slow and unreliable. it may have gotten worse as the days went by.

and yes, i was mainly interested in tracking the battery state to see how many days/hours of juice are left as the PSPS wears on.

thanks for the info!

I would get familiar with the local (on your own network and also on the gateway’s WiFi) address and the login and password (trivial, your email and last five of the serial number) but it’s good to have the procedure down.

I use it all the time to be sure that the gateway is working correctly and then if I need to access it during an outage when external external networks are out, it only takes a few seconds.

 

[aesculus]

Hate get off topic but my gateway sometimes does not respond on my local lan 192.168.1.xxx.

The app works great though. Checking the router and outdoor AP it's just not connected or getting a address. Sometimes opening the app can trigger the web connection but not always.

It may be a quirk in my setup as I don't let the outdoor wireless AP do DHCP and control that from the main router. The PW gateway is assigned a fixed IP address based on its MAC but somehome this is not always passed through it seems. I can see the PW in the outdoor AP with it's MAC and no IP address but not see it at all in the main AP. :-(