Storm Watch

[RBrogen]

I live in New England and today 7/27/2023 the forecast was and is for the potential of severe thunderstorms/damaging wind. I have stormwatch enabled on the app and it has worked in the past. Out of caution, and the fact I heard a big boom of thunder, I checked the app and the powerwall is at 15%, still discharging and (backup level set to 10% in app), and not in storm watch mode. Can someone help me understand how that makes sense I would greatly appreciate it.

 

[bemyax]

Yup. The Storm Watch algorithm looks for a National Weather Service warning at your location. Even if you are a only few hundred feet outside of the warning polygon, you will not get the charging from the grid. Last week I had that very thing happen. A few minutes after the storm went through, there was another warning that just barely caught my location which started the charge. I was like, dude, the storm is gone already.

I simply follow the practical wisdom that you can see when there is severe weather on the way. jack up the reserve and don't leave it to some ignorant computer in the sky.

David

 

[RBrogen]

They should enable us as end users to trigger the storm watch manually ... we know our weather and better to be prepared than have an outage

 

[bemyax]

In the app under Settings > Powerwall you might have an option of Grid Charging. If so, toggle that to Yes. Then raising the reserve level should induce behavior similar to Storm Watch.

EDIT: Tomorrow, my location is under "slight" risk of severe thunderstorms. I would wager there is no power outage here. However, in the morning after solar is producing, I will set my reserve to 70%. The sun and/or the grid will get things up to a least that level before anything happens.

David

 

[RBrogen]

Hi Bemyax.. I actually found that setting, I couldn't get the powerwall to actually change it's drain behavior until I re-paird my phone and in that process flipped the switch onthe powerwall. Not the first time the powerwall has seemed stuck.

 

[jjrandorin]

They should enable us as end users to trigger the storm watch manually ... we know our weather and better to be prepared than have an outage

You can do that by either toggling on grid charging if you have it available in your app, and / or changing your reserve to 100% so that you reserve all battery power. Like you said, you know your weather, so as soon as you see anything that concerns you, self manage this by changing your reserve (I do).