Powerwall lost power during an outage

[Flop]

Hi, I have four PowerWall +. I lost power yesterday and my power walls stopped operating. My energy consumption at that time was very small and the PowerWall’s were almost fully charged. The only major appliance operating was a dishwasher. When power was restored about 1/2 hour later, the PowerWall started operating again. Called Tesla online and was told that I had experienced a power surge probably due to some appliance that was operating at the time of the outage. As I recall, the surge magnitude was said to be around 30 A. Given that I have four PowerWall’s this explanation seems doubtful. Is it possible that there is some setting on the PowerWalls that is incorrect? Thanks.

 

[arnolddeleon]

My experience is that if the grid outage is "dirty" (it didn't cleanly go away) then my Powerwalls don't come on "instantly". I believe this is due to the requirement that the inverters follow the grid somewhat even when it out spec to prevent them cutting out too prematurely and causing a cascading failure with their generation disappearing at the worst possible moment. Basically the Powerwalls don't act like a UPS. I suspect this is more of a "brown out"

Was July 26 after 1:00 am Pacific? We had an outage that night/morning in Cupertino, CA. I was asleep when this outage happened but my wife says power was out for a little while before the Powerwalls kicked on.

 

[tomuo]

Ask Tesla to look at the gateway logs. I had a similar event a while back and the logs showed the gateway had detected unexpected voltage on the neutral (which should be zero).
In my case it was a wiring problem (dual circuit shared neutral landed in the wrong place that only unbalances when on backup), and I haven't had the problem since fixing that.

 

[BGbreeder]

Hi, I have four PowerWall +. I lost power yesterday and my power walls stopped operating. My energy consumption at that time was very small and the PowerWall’s were almost fully charged. The only major appliance operating was a dishwasher. When power was restored about 1/2 hour later, the PowerWall started operating again. Called Tesla online and was told that I had experienced a power surge probably due to some appliance that was operating at the time of the outage. As I recall, the surge magnitude was said to be around 30 A. Given that I have four PowerWall’s this explanation seems doubtful. Is it possible that there is some setting on the PowerWalls that is incorrect? Thanks.

If you only had a dishwasher running, there is no way it pulled 30A. So, either you have a wiring issue, such as a neutral wiring issue like @tomuo above, with a bad ground, or a bad neutral, or wiring issues, or something is wrong with the Gateway sensors.

My personal bet would be a wiring issue. If you have some one check it, don't forget to check the ground on your transformer, as in inspect, and test. We lost the ground on our transformer, which gave us minor imbalance issues as our house ground took up the slack, but eventually blew up the transformer. I would definitely have PG&E come out and do a site check on your transformer and feed. I would tell them that you have safety concerns arising from a surge that they fed into your home. They should be out within 24 hours.

All the best,

BG