Storm Watch Activated in SF East Bay

[BrettS]

I think it’s more than just being on the same account. I believe it also uses the car’s GPS to know when you are at home.

If you were three states away from your house you wouldn’t want your car to stop charging from the hotel’s charger when your house lost power and started running on it’s powerwalls.

 

[jboy210]

I think it’s more than just being on the same account. I believe it also uses the car’s GPS to know when you are at home.

If you were three states away from your house you wouldn’t want your car to stop charging from the hotel’s charger when your house lost power and started running on it’s powerwalls.

I wonder if this prevents the car from going into a deep sleep and cause it to consume power while parked.

 

[BrettS]

I wonder if this prevents the car from going into a deep sleep and cause it to consume power while parked.

I guess it kind of depends on exactly how they have it programmed, but I certainly would hope that they would make some effort to ensure that it doesn’t cause that problem.

It’s not like it would need to be continually checking and updating things though. One way it could work is that it could set a flag when you pull into your garage and it knows that it’s at home. Then, only when it wants to charge, if that flag is set then it would check with the powerwalls to make sure that it is OK to charge. If it’s not OK to charge then it could tell the powerwalls that it wants to charge and go back to sleep and the powerwalls could send it a wake up signal as soon as it is OK to charge.

Again, this is all speculation. I have no idea how it actually works, but I think it could definitely be done in such a way that it shouldn’t really affect the car’s sleep.

Now I’m just waiting for this feature to finally be available for my model S

 

[jboy210]

I guess it kind of depends on exactly how they have it programmed, but I certainly would hope that they would make some effort to ensure that it doesn’t cause that problem.

It’s not like it would need to be continually checking and updating things though. One way it could work is that it could set a flag when you pull into your garage and it knows that it’s at home. Then, only when it wants to charge, if that flag is set then it would check with the powerwalls to make sure that it is OK to charge. If it’s not OK to charge then it could tell the powerwalls that it wants to charge and go back to sleep and the powerwalls could send it a wake up signal as soon as it is OK to charge.

Again, this is all speculation. I have no idea how it actually works, but I think it could definitely be done in such a way that it shouldn’t really affect the car’s sleep.

Now I’m just waiting for this feature to finally be available for my model S

You would think it would not affect it, but my playing with the APIs and such leaves me to believe there is very little stored state data in the PowerWall design. Polling seems more their Modus Operandi.

 

[BrettS]

You would think it would not affect it, but my playing with the APIs and such leaves me to believe there is very little stored state data in the PowerWall design. Polling seems more their Modus Operandi.

I don’t believe that the car and the powerwalls can talk to each other directly anyway... they need to go through Tesla’s servers to communicate, so it’s quite possible that there is some logic on Tesla’s servers that work to coordinate this.

 

[jboy210]

I don’t believe that the car and the powerwalls can talk to each other directly anyway... they need to go through Tesla’s servers to communicate, so it’s quite possible that there is some logic on Tesla’s servers that work to coordinate this.

Agreed they need to go through the servers. My concern is how this coordination works and its impacts on the car's ability to deep sleep.

 

[charlesj]

Yeah, I hate when my battery gets deleted

(Sorry, I couldn’t resist)

Delete, deplete looked good. Brain fixed it but too late to update.

 

[aesculus]

I tend to agree it it's GPS related in terms of knowing that you are home and that is the location of your power walls.

If your car charger is not on the backup side of your panel then obviously there will be no charging.

If on the backup side and the PWs are in isolated state (non grid connected) then there is probably some sort of state that the car checks with HQ to set its max charge value and of course will terminate when the PW reaches the set energy threshold. So some sort of state information needs to be exchanged.

Note I have my charger on the grid side so I have no way to test any of the above.

 

[miimura]

I suspect that the vehicle coordination is activating the charging from the vehicle and looking for corresponding load on the PWs. There was some video on YouTube that was testing this feature and the way it worked led me to believe this. I don't recall the specific sequence.

 

[Boatguy]

My EVs sit 3' from the PWs and are on the same account, but they are on a separate meter. My concern is that Tesla is connecting dots that shouldn't be connected. I've set the threshold to 10% so they should charge anyway, but it smells like an example of Tesla arrogance since they didn't provide a way to just turn the "feature" off.

 

[Ngenn]

Looks like the Bay Area just went on Storm Watch again. Will see what mine does at 100%.

Looks like I can only pull from solar to charge and not the grid although I thought I saw that being done the other day. I have two powerwalls and am in the Bay Area.

 

[Ngenn]

Well looks like it now stated pulling from the grid. Guess it hadn’t updated to storm watch on the prior view/screenshot as it didn’t have the storm watch identification on this screenshot/screen like it does now. Got the alert and saw it on the main screen but must not have propagated all the way through.

 

[Ngenn]

Is the only reason it doesn’t do this in non-storm watch mode (topping off my powerwall with low cost energy so that I can get past peak w/o grid) is because PG&E doesn’t allow it, or is there a way to set this.

 

[charlesj]

Is the only reason it doesn’t do this in non-storm watch mode (topping off my powerwall with low cost energy so that I can get past peak w/o grid) is because PG&E doesn’t allow it, or is there a way to set this.

No way to set it. PG&E likes to squeeze out the last penny from customers if possible.
Grid charging PW only allowed during a Storm Watch event.

 

[Sonus]

Stormwatch just activated in San Jose {again}.

 

[JPP]

Yup, Storm Watch activated in Contra Costa County synchronous with a High Fire risk warning from my local police due to expected lightning strikes and fire.

 

[jboy210]

Storm Watch is also on here in Tri-Valley.

 

[jboy210]

No way to set it. PG&E likes to squeeze out the last penny from customers if possible.
Grid charging PW only allowed during a Storm Watch event.

As I understand it, the limitation on only changing Powerwalls from solar, except Storm Watch is nationwide. Unlike countries like Australia where they routinely use their Powerwalls to change at low price times and sell back at high priced times.

 

[charlesj]

As I understand it, the limitation on only changing Powerwalls from solar, except Storm Watch is nationwide. Unlike countries like Australia where they routinely use their Powerwalls to change at low price times and sell back at high priced times.

Yep, national power company conspiracy to squeeze every penny out of you.

 

[miimura]

The Red Flag warning covered the entire Bay Area on Sunday. I manually toggled Storm Watch on for 1.5 hours of extra charging this morning. That brought my SOC from 35% to 85% and the solar topped it right up to 100% just before 3pm. The smoke was really thick this afternoon.