Sunday, May 27, 2018

Tesla PowerWalls

I recently had 2 Tesla Powerwalls installed. It took about a year and a half to go from reservation to finished installation. The process mostly went smoothly, but there were some pains too.

During the time when Tesla was trying to get permission to do the installations in Colorado the Model 3 came out and there were some problems with Tesla having enough batteries and Xcel being a giant pain in the ass with law suits, etc. Tesla's sales team kept sending me emails blaming Xcel, which was true, but it was also true that they didn't have any powerwalls sitting ready to install. So I finally said "Look, I hate Xcel too, but until you've got two Powerwalls sitting ready to come out to my house for installation, stop telling me it's Xcel's fault the installation isn't happening yet." I got back a nice reply that was basically, "ok, we'll let you know when we can schedule installation."

Finally the installation gets scheduled after 2 full rewrites of the plan without any further visits from Tesla. I requested a walk through because I wanted to be sure my very old garage wasn't going to cause any trouble. During the walk through, we decided on yet another rewrite of the plan.

Two weeks later on a Thursday, the teams shows up with 2 days scheduled for the install, and they finished it in about 8 hours. That was great, and all the techs were great to work with, professional and did a great job.

The next day (Friday) I got a "Payment Reminder" telling me I agreed to have already paid the installation price. Well the installation wasn't finished since it hadn't been inspected and couldn't be turned on. But hey, I'm a nice guy, so I just ignored it.

Sunday, in the middle of the morning, my power went out. I checked all the breakers, none were tripped, so I called Xcel and they said they'd send someone out. I also called Tesla to let them know they might need to come out and take a look. Then I went out to look more closely to see if I could see anything. Turns out I remembered incorrectly and one of the new Tesla installed boxes had a breaker in it which was tripped. I reset it, my power came back on, and I started calling people to tell them things were fixed.

Shortly there after the power went out again, so I went to check all the breakers. The new breaker that had been tripped was tripped again, and while I was trying to reset it and failing I realized I could smell toasted electrical equipment. As I'm calling Tesla to get a tech out, Xcel pulls up and I let them know it's not their deal.

Luckily, what I had planned that day could be done with sunlight. After about 4 hours total a Tesla tech showed up and fixed things so I had power. I later learned it wasn't just a tech but the area supervisor. Great guy, very helpful. He fixed it, but said that he'd have one of his techs come out to entirely replace it on Tuesday.

Monday rolls around and the inspection happens. The inspector found a couple of small "You don't have to do these, but they are best practice" kinds of things, and gave approval so we turned the whole system on. It was very exciting! Later that afternoon a Tesla came out and replaced the bad breaker with a new one. No problems at all since then.

It's very interesting in that you get an app that shows a bunch of information about the power flow in the house. Indeed, data much like what I should have been given with the solar cells when they were installed, or at least when I paid a bunch more money to get a DataLogger. The Tesla app is way better, but I wish it wasn't only available via an app. I hate having to have apps on my phone for stuff like that.

The app shows powerflow, fail over history, current powerwall storage levels, etc. You can also have it set to just work as backup, or to go partially or fully off grid. So I have mine set to save aside 25% in case of power outages while there is no solar power. My house draws about 1kW continuous when I'm just doing normal stuff. Over night the powerwalls get down to about 25% left, then are fully recharged by about 1pm on a sunny day.

I've still got a lot of stuff to learn about how this all interplays and how to reduce my power usage after dark, etc. It's been quite interesting and I'm looking forward to not having power outages anymore.

No comments: