Gadgetory

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airport we got the email and I was like oh it's too bad I'm not home to turn my solar system on because then it could be sucking up juice while we're gone and giving us a credit or charging the powerwall but all that is to say though I'm turning it on today for the first time I'm gonna walk you guys through the steps and we'll see how things go under stuff why there are some devices I need to connect up like this home gateway that allows the system to connect back to Tesla so can report usage data as well as potential outages I do have some concerns about Internet of Things connected devices that might phone home they're connected to my network for now though it's a bright sunny day here in Southern California it's supposed to be in the low 90s Fahrenheit temperature wise that's about 33 or 30 34 degrees Celsius so step one is going to be to set up the gateway step two is going to be to turn everything off and then step three is going to be to turn it back on with the power wall and the solar integrated that was pretty simple that power connected as well as you thin it and right now we got no server and no signal but I think I need to pop up an app now to connect to this it does seem to have internet though it said no internet just a second ago okay got the app up and running at saying connection error no current data right now does it seem to indicate they have solar though so that's good I think this is probably because the Gateway outside is off so let's go and switch that stuff on that glorious sunlight being wasted right now it's serving no purpose let's change that only real difference from last time I showed this to you guys was that they came and patched this whole area up and did a bit of paint matching so it's good enough I suppose and unfortunately when Jerry was here he gave me instructions on properly turning the system off and back on so they're supposed to be switches in here oh yeah the sub panel is what I want so this is explaining why we're not getting any connection it's just a battery and the solar have been off just to be on the safe side I'm switching everything else off right now Oh probably not necessary to do that but you know looks like the power wall is already off as well so I don't need to switch that off and finally main breaker also off okay like everything is now off so if I'm reading this rate I want to do the breakers on first on the sub panel that's right there and I need to turn on the external disconnect which I don't believe is an issue and then I turn on the inverter which is over there let's give this a shot this pair was off battery solar then I think we can do this next I hope I don't think the AC should matter cuz it's not on right now gateway lane i hear beeps in science that's how its back on yeah now do you see this connect on position on the battery it's the power wall it made a noise well attempt one scene was unsuccessful we still have no connection so I'm gonna have to mess her on this app and see what I can figure out that's on the plus side of the inverter over here we can't see power is on you can also see that the panels are working even though it's morning we're getting a little over 3,000 watts out of them right now to about a 5,000 watt system overall so that's not bad it's also showing us how many watt hours we've accumulated for the day I'm still not getting as proper connection from the Gateway here so I think I'm gonna make use of this recessed reset button right there seems user serviceable enough right elated me they were poking into electrical box make sure to use something non conductive I usually hold in reset buttons for 5 to 20 seconds all right I think I made some progress because we can now see the actual output 3.7 kilowatts from the solar array so I think I got the solar array properly communicating back to the home server and delivering information to the app this I don't think is working properly because the light hasn't turned green lights supposed to turn green once everything's good to go although it does seem to have an internet connection so I don't think anything is really wrong there I have emailed Tesla with the present situation to see what's helped they can provide in the meantime though because I like to do things myself and I want to get this running I've decided to make the bold choice to RTFM we do have a parallel manual here there is a troubleshooting section in here where it goes over what to do with the power wall and the backup gateway are not communicating with the server this glia it's a glorified turn it off and back on again so let's go through this and see if I can get it fixed I'm really not sure if you guys can see this but there is a green LED that runs down right here this is the power wall indicator and it is pulsing which I believe according to the manual means it is charging right now but a connection to the Gateway means we can't see how much it's charged or how the whole system is operating but step one here is turn the switch off done step two turn off the AC breaker to the power wall that's the battery then step three is to turn off the breaker for the Gateway which sometimes is part of the Gateway but I don't have one exposed there so I'm pretty sure that's this one here fingers crossed now I wait for one minute this is remarkably similar to resetting a router I think it's been a minute or two and the backup gateway actually just physically made a noise so and assume that means that we're good to go switch stuff back on battery little jingling noise just a second ago and power well back up one thing that wasn't completely sealed up as this pastor here this is where the ground wire goes through from the back the house to the front should be grills on this just gonna use some foam sealant to fill that and make sure no critters get yet it should do the trick so ultimately my troubleshooting attempts were not successful and that was because the two devices the power wall and the Gateway were not actually registered to my Tesla account so the next day I decided to call Tesla directly their support number that's listed in the documentation I talked to Dee she was very friendly and helpful and she sort of talked me through this process I need to get the serial numbers from the power wall and the Gateway I needed to plug those into the website and that associated everything with my account so after that was done everything started working and Dee stayed on the phone with me and her to make sure that the Tesla app was actually functional as well and once everything's up and running the app is really sort of your home base for taking a look at the system seeing how it's working seeing how much power you have stored how much power you're using how much power is being generated by the solar and the first thing that I needed to do was actually go into the customize button because you can customize your power wall and tell it how you want it to behave my power wall had actually defaulted to backup only mode which means it will charge itself up and then it will sit and do nothing unless the power actually goes out and then you can have that as a battery backup for your home that's not how I wanted to use it though so I switched over to self powered and self-care mode you can tell it to reserve a certain amount for power outages I originally had this set to 15 percent then I dropped it down to 10 percent which is what Tesla recommends this is just telling the power wall to reserve that much power in case of a power outage the way I have it set it can use up to 90 percent of the power walls storage juice while it's not being charged by the solar now the interesting part of the app is definitely going to be the power flow grid and this is where it will actually show you your solar your grid your home and your power wall depending on what's currently being used I switch over to the energy usage chart here and this will actually give you a graph of how much power is being generated used in everything and you can turn off all of these individually so for example if you just want to look at how much power your home is drawing you can turn everything off your home and it'll tell you how much power your home has drawn for the day so right now I've used 4.8 kilowatt hours for the course of the day today it also has the time down at the bottom so you can sort of see throughout the day how things proceed now I find that our home is drawing about 200 to 400 watts at any given time that's assuming we're not cooking anything and a/c is not on it'll go up and down during the day you can see little bumps along that actual usage meter as that goes up and down so like if the refrigerator cycles on for example or if you have devices that are charging that charge themselves Instructor drop power and then you see little spikes going in there as things happen so let me walk you through a typical day and I'm gonna take a look at yesterday and not only that I record some stuff yesterday but I also recorded this guy yesterday and right now it's June and here in Southern California we have something called June gloom which means in the mornings I actually get a marine layer of clouds that kind of comes over and gives you some nice cool weather if you're only interested in that but does block the sunlight so yesterday morning for example in the morning in particular you can see that the solar generation is really not all there I mean normally on a completely sunny day I would see a nice even arc going up from the morning time when the solar panels first start to get light getting more direct sunlight throughout the day peaking for me about noonish and then it sort of falls off for the rest of the day as the Sun moves across the sky and we get less direct sunlight across the solar panels clouds are now evil and I hate them and they block the Sun and prevent me from getting power but but even with that sort of not the best power generation because of the clouds I was able to still charge the power all up by about noon and if I remove the solar here you can see the power wall was powering the house up until about seven or eight in the morning and then it switches back to the power wall being charged once there is enough solar to charge the power wall once the power wall is charged up is when the grid starts taking into effect so the grid is the white bar on here and the idea for the grid is that I should never have a positive it should never be going up on the line above the grid because I should either be running on the solar or I should be running on the power wall and from my experience this past week I have been charging the power wall in the morning and then once the power wall is charged up it starts feeding that power back to the grid and for that I will get a credit which was gonna be pretty nice now from the very beginning of this process from when I first signed up and put my deposit for the tesla powerwall back in 2017 I've been planning sort of a contained beginning to end video of this entire process rather than the sort of piecemeal but at a time videos I've been posting over the past month or so I am still planning to do that video but probably not for another month or so because I need to get power bill back so I can serve look at the rate it's charging me and give you guys a bit more analysis of that and that video is gonna be sort of a lot of the stuff that I've gone over up till now condensed down to be a little bit more palatable I'm also hopefully gonna get some more feedback from Tesla on certain questions so if you guys have any questions for me stuff that maybe I haven't addressed up till now or just general questions about the power wall or the solar definitely leave those in the comments section and I will attempt to address them in that final video today it's been nice and sunny so far so right now I'm getting four point eight kilowatts at about just before 11 a.m. so near full capacity that the potential 5,000 watts that my system should be able to output I am considering going up there and maybe cleaning them off a little bit they said that you can just wait for rain to clean them but you might want to hose them down a little bits in between if they start getting dusty because as we know from the Martian dust and sand that builds up on your solar panels must be cleaned in order for you get power from them I still need to do some more testing on what I actually do here during the day for example so if I'm shooting a video in the garage and I have all the lights on I did do a livestream earlier this week and that was only drawing about eleven or twelve hundred watts for them from the entire production so that's actually pretty good the solar was able to cover that and also still be feeding power back to the grid and I will also say that pretty much every night the power wall has had enough juice to provide us power during the evening as well as throughout the nights most of the time in the morning I woke up with between twenty and thirty percent of a charge still left on the power wall and of course that gets recharged pretty quickly on the performance tab you can see if you have been self powered or not and that's the idea is to not use anything from the grid so you can see here for today we're 98% self powered so far look at yesterday we got to 99 percent so doing pretty well with that with the trade-off between the power wall and the solar and actually for this entire week we're 96% self powered although that's including June 19th which hasn't finished yet if I want to maintain that self powered performance as the summer progresses it's definitely going to be the afternoons that become a potential issue as the solar generation drops off when the AC goes on is when my usage jumps up to two to three thousand watts for the entire house and there especially in the afternoon the solar can't keep up with it so starts dipping into the power wall usage originally I thought the power wall wasn't gonna be able to back up the AC but that does seem to be the case I have a theory on that in just a second but the main point being the further into the evening we need to use the AC if it hasn't cooled off and it definitely will get hot even in the evenings later in the summer as it gets up into the 90s and 100's here in Southern California but when that happens it might draw too much juice from the power wall so that it doesn't have enough left over to power us for the rest of the nights then it might have to switch to the grid before the Sun comes up the next morning to charge the power wall back up to sort of combat that and I know this kind of goes against my scientific a be comparisons of pre solar and power wall to post I have tried to figure out ways that I can save power in the mean time so I've added this little switch down here this is just for the home theater area but I might apply this practice elsewhere in the house too so stuff that might draw power on and I like the subwoofer the receiver the Xbox that we almost never use unless we want to watch a 4k blu-ray are plugged into that switch I also plugged in a light string over here so we can know whether it's on or off and then when we're done watching TV we switch that off cuts the power to everything so anything that might have a trickle draw that might be wasting power just in standby mode is cut off by using that switch and I think I might apply that elsewhere in the house because when you actually have an app that you look at that you can see your power draw usage at any given time makes you think like wow switching that on suddenly like jumped up the power usage by a thousand watts or switching that stuff off helped reduce the nominal power usage so so little things like that I think will help keep the power draw from the grids to a minimum hopefully never more than one or two percent break in 4900 watts it's pretty awesome I think my biggest incentive to clean the panel's is to try to break 5k we're breaking 4900 but it'd be nice to see it get about 5k there's one final look at the system though it's a little bit dusty now that it has been broken in but um so here's here's the final mystery that I'm trying to solve and my theory as to how it's working and this is based on a few other videos on Tesla and the pyro wall and solar that I found online in my research so here's the main panel 200 amp breaker and then I got to 100 amp breakers ones for the AC once for the Gateway after the Gateway over here everything should be backed up by the battery and it has does have a switch for the battery so the AC is not on this panel and yet when a C has been running it apparently according to the charts has been drawing power from the power wall so I'm not 100% sure how that's working I don't know if the AC is being fed back through the Gateway somehow or if there's some sort of load balancing it's doing where it's actually feeding back from the power wall to the grid well it's also pulling energy to run the AC off the grid I've read some speculation on that but I'll see if I can get more details on that before the next video that's all the time I have for this one though guys thank you so much for watching I'm going a little blind because it's sunny which is good the Sun is good because it provides me power now but I'm gonna get inside or maybe at least put Hannah I hit the thumbs-up button if you enjoyed this video though and of course leave me comments in the comment section down below if you have any questions for the final follow-up video which is going to be in about a month or so thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time