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Will California and West see Storm Watch in the next few days (2022-12-29)?

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Power is out here and due to our location, we might be off for a few days. Sometimes it takes almost a week to restore things.

Currently at 93% charge and PV is trickling in at 0.7 kW. The house load is 5-600W and my wife and I both put on long sleeves to reduce our space heating needs. It will be interesting to see how we fare if this is an extended outage.

My neighbors driveway is half washed away, as the flash floods washed over the culvers the previous homeowner installed. Erosion swiftly followed and will likely get worse before the week is over.

I am thankful for Starlink, at least we have internet to go with our power, and its not dependent on someone elses backup battery.
Sorry you have been impacted by the rain/flooding. I thought of you knowing the area had roads out and flooding. I was awoken at 5am by torrential rain and strong wind gusts here hitting the windows. Can only imagine how bad it was there getting dumped on first before arriving here. Heart goes out to all with storm damage. Best of luck with keeping essentials powered.
 
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Day 1 of our outage looks pretty good so far. Since the sun came out, we were able to recharge nearly all the power we have used so far. In fact, once we got to 96% I started dumping extra kWh into my car and running the dishwasher, so as to not frequency shift and lose any PV generation. I left my kill-o-watt plugged in so I could watch the frequency carefully.

I really like the integration of the EV with Powerwalls. I have the slider set to 95% so once the Powerwalls get there, they start slowly sending power to the HPWC. At first I was seeing a full 48A charge, but then it slowed down to 6-8 amps to match the PV generation and keep the batteries right at 94-95%. So far today we have generated 11 kWh, used 13kWh for the house and 5kWh to charge the car.

The road and valley next to us has an estimate to restore power in 2 days from now. Currently, we don't have an assessed time we might get power back so we are playing with minimum usage. This is also the first long outage since our system was commissioned so we weren't sure how it would go at first.

after completion of the impending doubling of our PV system size, we could probably last a couple of weeks without power even with minimum generation days.
 
Day 1 of our outage looks pretty good so far. Since the sun came out, we were able to recharge nearly all the power we have used so far. In fact, once we got to 96% I started dumping extra kWh into my car and running the dishwasher, so as to not frequency shift and lose any PV generation. I left my kill-o-watt plugged in so I could watch the frequency carefully.

I really like the integration of the EV with Powerwalls. I have the slider set to 95% so once the Powerwalls get there, they start slowly sending power to the HPWC. At first I was seeing a full 48A charge, but then it slowed down to 6-8 amps to match the PV generation and keep the batteries right at 94-95%. So far today we have generated 11 kWh, used 13kWh for the house and 5kWh to charge the car.

The road and valley next to us has an estimate to restore power in 2 days from now. Currently, we don't have an assessed time we might get power back so we are playing with minimum usage. This is also the first long outage since our system was commissioned so we weren't sure how it would go at first.

after completion of the impending doubling of our PV system size, we could probably last a couple of weeks without power even with minimum generation days.
Glad it is working. As much as I would like to test my system like you are doing, I will pass and believe you. We continue to get lots of rain, but so far, I am not lost power, even though lots around have.
 
@Vines Sorry to hear about the outage and the road damage. In the first set of storms, the culvert below us filled with washed out material, and water was leaking through the road bed, so a total failure seemed imminent, but the local road crews got on it, and we have been lucky since, though we did lose one lane on one of our roads to get here. I keep expecting more big trees to go down.

Any tips on how you got your usage below 0.6kW?

All the best,

BG
 
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Wow! I did not know Monterey was having issues. Did the Powerwalls cover the outage?
Nicely as we didn't use much electricity even though we did laundry. Used 50% of 2 PW.
Gas cooking and water heating but have fan motors and recirc hot water pump. We even had internet for that 18 HRs. Nice to turn on some outside LEDs in all the darkness. :D
One of the previous outages halfway into it Internet and cable went out. I even used a 100ft extension cord run to my good neighbor to run his sump pump periodically.
Today we had sun so pumped up the battery to about 85%.
We have lots of trees that took out lot of poles and xformers.
 
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Nicely as we didn't use much electricity even though we did laundry. Used 50% of 2 PW.
Gas cooking and water heating but have fan motors and recirc hot water pump. We even had internet for that 18 HRs. Nice to turn on some outside LEDs in all the darkness. :D
One of the previous outages halfway into it Internet and cable went out. I even used a 100ft extension cord run to my good neighbor to run his sump pump periodically.
Today we had sun so pumped up the battery to about 85%.
We have lots of trees that took out lot of poles and xformers.
So, are your neighbors asking you about solar and Powerwall?
 
@Vines Sorry to hear about the outage and the road damage. In the first set of storms, the culvert below us filled with washed out material, and water was leaking through the road bed, so a total failure seemed imminent, but the local road crews got on it, and we have been lucky since, though we did lose one lane on one of our roads to get here. I keep expecting more big trees to go down.

Any tips on how you got your usage below 0.6kW?

All the best,

BG
Wow, any time you have water sinking into the road, things are going to fail. Glad you can still pass the road at least, and hope that access survives the rest of the storms.

As far as our 600W usage, we are still mostly a propane powered house so cooking and heating water energy come from the propane tank. We turned off our kitchen vent fan and cooked with the oven instead of running the space heaters as well. The biggest single draw is now the well and pressure tank. Anytime the pressure pump turns on it pulls 2 kW for about 15-20 minutes, and the deep well pump takes about 3.5 kW.

We also have gone through and eliminated many vampire draws by switching off power strips and unplugging unnecessary wall transformers.
 
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Wow, any time you have water sinking into the road, things are going to fail. Glad you can still pass the road at least, and hope that access survives the rest of the storms.

As far as our 600W usage, we are still mostly a propane powered house so cooking and heating water energy come from the propane tank. We turned off our kitchen vent fan and cooked with the oven instead of running the space heaters as well. The biggest single draw is now the well and pressure tank. Anytime the pressure pump turns on it pulls 2 kW for about 15-20 minutes, and the deep well pump takes about 3.5 kW.

We also have gone through and eliminated many vampire draws by switching off power strips and unplugging unnecessary wall transformers.
We are similar. Still use Natgas for stove and heating. Solarroof seems to be generating OK for the solid overcast this AM, 0.8-2 kW. Generated 8 kWh yesterday with rain and no sun. The recent winds have blown down almost all of the leaves in the big Oak trees that shade the south facing roof.