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Stress Testing the Electrical System
Mar 17, 2023
Here's what's happening right now as part of our #GreenDreamHome experiment. (As a reminder, a large amount of what we've done with this house is experimental as there were so few examples of similar houses that we could use as a model.) A couple of weeks ago, #SouthernCaliforniaEdison notified our neighborhood that today, March 14th, they were going to have a planned power outage for system maintenance from 9:00AM to 4:00PM. In preparation, I made sure that our #Tesla batteries were fully charged yesterday using electricity from our solar panels.
I was standing in our kitchen at 9:00AM waiting for the power to go out. I could hear our refrigerator running and expected it to stop momentarily when the power went out and the house switched to backup batteries. I never heard the refrigerator pause, but I received a notice on my phone from our Tesla system that the grid had failed. Initially, since the grid failed and the batteries were full, the system disconnected our solar panels, the same as with any house that has solar panels and no batteries. Once the batteries had drained a small amount, the system reconnected the solar panels so that they could recharge the batteries/power the house.
Based on what the system is showing, we have plenty of stored electricity to get through this outage. If it wasn't a rainy day we'd probably use very little battery power. As designed, everything is pretty normal, except that we can't use the oven or stove. However the microwave works. Also, in a wider power outage, we probably wouldn't have internet through our cable provider, but for now, we are still connected.