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Storm watch and self-powered mode

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So in central Pennsylvania, under a storm watch with tons of snow coming down. Just had Solar + 2 Powerwalls installed last month so it was a good experience to see what happens during a storm. A couple of questions, usually I have the system set to self-powered with 25% reserve, when storm watch kicked in yesterday, I switched it to backup mode only knowing that we will likely have outages (we usually do). This evening we lost power, the lights flickered (assuming it wasn't a clean outage) battery took over. However, I did notice that once the gird came back on, I changed it to self-powered mode with 50% reserve incase another outage happens, but it would not pull from the battery at all. It seems like when storm watch is activated you cannot operate in self-powered mode, is that correct? Also noticed that the power was out for about half-hour when it came back on it automatically topped off the battery back to 99% from the grid.
 
That is correct, if you are in the middle of a storm watch event, self-powered mode will not work if storm watch is activated. You would need to switch off storm watch in your settings for self-power mode to work. The app tends to error out when you try to deactivate storm watch (if you are in the middle of a storm watch event). Just close the app and reopen it, it should show storm watch deactivated. It will take 5 mins or so before self-powered mode will kick in.
 
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Most important question. Did you have power when your neighbors did not? And did they notice??!!

We had an outage last week from 3 until 5 AM. We sleep through it and never even knew it happened except for a message on our phones when we woke up. My next-door neighbor's kids woke him up at 3:30 AM because the nightlights went out and they got scared. While stumbling around in the dark to find a flashlight for his kids, my neighbor noticed our outside lights. He stopped me the next to talk about Powerwalls.