Stormwatch in UK

[mikemillar]

Looks like we are in for serious storms in the UK this weekend - up north Saturday night and down south on Sunday night. Does the Powerwall (2) have storm watch in the UK? There will probably be power outages. What's the best strategy for charging in advance if on Advanced Cost Saving mode? - Also posted on the UK and Ireland Forum.

 

[MarkJ]

Surely it's as simple s increasing the "Reserve for power outages" percentage as high, or even to 100%, as you'd like? And just accept you'll be running on grid mostly/entirely until you decide the risk is over.

 

[mikemillar]

That would bee the obvious way to do it I guess. I'm not sure how storm watch works, but I don't think we've got it in the UK. Anyway, the devastating storm seems to have faded away.

 

[JohnRatsey]

Most PW owners in the USA aren't allowed to charge from the mains supply due to the way the tax credit they get for installing solar power. Stormwatch is the agreed exception to this requirement. In the UK there's no similar restriction on charging from the mains and those with backup gateways can charge the battery at any time by increasing the backuo reserve. Those, like me, without the backup gateway can't do this but given that everything will stop if the mains goes off then having a full battery is irrelevant. Fortunately I live in a town where the supply is relatively reliable (I appreciate some of the benefits of the urban life after being brought up on a farm in rural Somerset).

 

[mikemillar]

Thanks John. That may also explain why nobody has yet picked up the problem i'm having with my Smart Meter. However, I tried changing to Self Powered mode for 10 hours yesterday and it made no difference at all. The Powerwall still took the same amount of background power from the grid while supplying the whole house. I assume switched over, I saw no other change on the app and the my api downloads looked the same.

 

[sashton]

*grin* having been brought up a few miles from mikemillar and moved TO a farm in rural Somerset (11kV overhead supply has delivered 17 power cuts this year) I am so glad I changed to a BuGV2 in Jan this year.
One thing I noticed is that the BuGV2 claims to be five times as accurate as the original Gateway... although the not inconsiderable cost of upgrading could never be justified on that claimed improvement alone.

 

[mikemillar]

*grin* having been brought up a few miles from mikemillar and moved TO a farm in rural Somerset (11kV overhead supply has delivered 17 power cuts this year) I am so glad I changed to a BuGV2 in Jan this year.

Lucky you! Just spent 2 weeks in a friend's gîte in Normandy, which is rather like Somerset, but the roads are better. Power supplies aren't though. The main RCBO tripped every time we boiled a kettle while the Model S was charging from the 13 amp supply. Apparently they pay more for electricity if they up the capacity. We're rural here in Sussex too and on overhead lines. We used to get a lot of power cuts, every time it rained, Not much now, but a big outage last year, we were on a Seeboard generator for a week - the second outage was when the pikey's nicked the copper cables!. I'm hoping I won't need my Honda generator now we've got the backup Powerwall. I have noticed one or two very short outages on the app, but the NAS didn't miss a beat so it's providing a UPS backup equivalent. I had no option but BuGV2, and there was a £1000 price hike for the change over to the V2 gateway during ordering. That made the cost benefit even more marginal, which is one reason why my excessive power drain niggles me. But I think I' better off with it.

 

[sashton]

...going even more off-topic here...
I've just noticed that the Octopus Agile tariff went negative last night for five hours (they pay you to consume power!) and tonight they must be desperate as they are raising the bribe to use power to over 5.5p/kWh … charge your Tesla and get paid for doing it.

 

[mikemillar]

Nice! Rather a lot of wind up north?

 

[JohnRatsey]

That fickle wind - nearly 12GW as I type this and about 10GW more than on 30th November. It wreaks havoc with scheduling the other forms of generation. We need some massive energy storage schemes.