Welcome to Tesla Motors Club
Discuss Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, Roadster and More.
Register

StormWatch enabled in Norcal East Bay / Tri-Valley (20 Jan 2022)

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.
Couple observations:

I woke up around 0500 this morning and flipped the Storm Watch toggle to "on" to enable it. I got the Stormwatch notification on my iOS devices almost immediately but charging didn't start for about another hour. That was slightly unexpected.

Also, Tesla Energy has improved the StormWatch documentation (click on "Storm Watch" then "Learn More" in the mobile app). They now list the severe weather events that will cause Storm Watch activation (for the US anyways), as well as a few more details I don't remember from before about geolocation by cell towers.

Bruce.
 
strange man - in the evening they canceled the wind warning for the lower areas of the east bay hills, and storm watch shut off. then at 12:30AM i was woken up by my kids who let me know that our huge cedar tree in the backyard had fallen onto the neighbor's house. the wind was absolutely nuts - must have been 65mph gusts.

lots of power outages across berkeley and oakland as well. we could see power lines arcing across the road. ended up calling 911, but not sure they ever found the downed lines. only after looking at the PGE outage map was it obvious where the sparks were.

i guess NWS messed up this time.
 
Just read in AppleNews a Mercury News story ( Big Sur wildfire forces evacuations; Highway 1 closed in both directions — The Mercury News ) about the fire in Big Sur dubbed The Colorado Fire and spread by the same winds that toppled trees in the Oakland Hills. “The highway closure spanned from near the Andrew Molera State Park entrance area in Big Sur to Rio Road in Carmel, according to Caltrans District 5.” Highway 1 closed in both directions. Never know when the winds can change and take you out, fire being the worst result.

BigSurKate had these videoed shared on her web site:



If you want to follow the Big Sur fire news Kate is the go-to local resident providing updates from fire etc for the area. I remember her reporting the Big Sur fire coverage a few years back when it seemed all of Big Sur was on fire. Here’s here blog link:
 
Last edited:
here is the silver lining for me... +5KW or +29% vs last year on similar date with full sun.

Screen Shot 2022-01-22 at 5.19.25 PM.png
 
  • Like
Reactions: jboy210
What app is this?

PVoutput


it is pretty nice and it can pull generation data (or you can push data to it) from a variety of inverters. storage isn't super well integrated in the sense that it only knows about the solar and the grid and your home as sources/sinks of electricity. thus to get it to calculate how much i'm spending on electricity properly with the powerwalls, i had to make a fake system that only looks at grid import/export.
 
For us this whole wind event was nothing, as in the trees did not sway at all, no leaves falling, etc. And the event was very localized. On the other side of Pleasanton, people posted that their front doors were blown open.

you are lucky - amazingly, almost exactly 10 years ago a similar crazy windstorm knocked over our oak tree, which must have been 100+ years old. i counted 80 rings in the cedar tree, but could be +/- 10 as some of the rings are quite closely spaced and hard to discern. sad to see such long-lived organisms die.

i hated the tree for its effects on solar production but i would have never removed it - not sure it would have paid off. i'm just glad no one was hurt and no structures were significantly damaged (the neighbor's metal awning over their porch was partially destroyed, and the fences have a slot in them now, so we all got off relatively easy). the tree was at least 55 feet tall based on the distance from the stump to where the tip landed on their roof.