A few days ago I registered my annoyance with Tesla Energy and their shitty support, over what I perceived to be a problem. As it turns out, it's working as designed, but I learned this entirely from unofficial sources.
My solar wasn't generating when I was off-grid, which seemed like a problem to me. Then I learned that this was by design in the event that the Powerwall state-of-charge is higher than 90-something-percent. This makes sense, because if the battery is full, there's nowhere for the solar energy to go. Because the solar inverters are not an integrated part of the system (they're made by another company and do not communicate with the Powerwall's energy gateway), the system has to trick them into not generating. Inverters have to synchronize their frequency with the grid, running at 60Hz, so that your sources of power all run at the same frequency. When it disconnects from the grid, and your battery is full, it fakes out the inverters by boosting the frequency over 62Hz, and I guess there are regulations that require inverters in the US to not generate if the frequency is that high. So when my battery was full, it was running at around 62.5Hz, effectively shutting out the inverters.
I confirmed this by running down the battery and manually going off-grid. Sure enough, the solar was generating power and feeding the house and battery.
Here's the thing though, this is not explained in the consumer manual or the installation manual for the gear. I pieced this together by reading Reddit posts. And the fuckwit support people either don't know this, or they did and instead of sharing it just disappeared my support case. This is on brand for Tesla's energy division. It's terrible. The techs in the field are good people, but getting one to your house is nearly impossible. There was the original solar and battery install problems, the time I got stuck off-grid a few years ago, and then this year's failures. And one of the inverters stopped talking to their old school communication bridge, so depending on which thing is the source of truth, the bridge or the gateway's metering, they don't have an accurate picture of my generation. That matters because there is a guarantee that they have to meet for ten years.
So again, I do not recommend Tesla for solar or backup power. They're just not very good.
I'm trying to engage in a project that I started five years ago. Yes, it's a private social "network," which is to say, it's not really a network if it's just for me. And probably my friends. As Meta gets further and further into the territory of "no consequences," and fails to be social in any way, I want to move on. I'm already just posting and rarely reading, so why bother? It's little more than a contextual journal at this point.
All of those years ago, I sketched out some data structures that would make it pretty easy to adapt to various post types (text, photos, links, etc.), but at some point it became pretty convoluted. Reasonably, it gets out of the over-normalized relational stuff and adopts more serialized bits as they relate to sub-types of content. But also, it makes some decisions about when to serialize or deserialize and send it over the wire. Whatever my thinking was when I started that, I do not recall. So as I come back to it, none of it works. This week I've sat down to look at it three times and lost interest very fast.
It's so clear to me why I didn't have the output of my peers when I was writing code as my primary job. Now I know it's the ADHD, but at the time I just thought that I was lazy. That's definitely not the case. What's interesting though is that when I have a clean start, I go for super simple everything. As it turns out, the non-neurotypical nature of my brain prefers simplicity, limited scope and much more readable code. When I encounter something in code that I wrote more than a decade ago, it feels over-engineered and gross. I wonder now if the simplicity would make up for the output if I were doing this as my primary job function.
In any case, I've resolved that I just need to start over with the end-to-end transmission of data between the client and the database, with all of the stuff in between. The database is fine, it's everything in between. If you write code, then you've heard of "data transfer objects," or DTO's, which I've always found to be cumbersome and often not necessary. My forum app doesn't have them. And part of the way that you get away with that is server-side rendering of user interfaces, which in this case isn't what I'm doing. So you add this go between over the wire, and then you're in the business of optimally shaping payloads. What I'm starting to get is that payloads are just wrappers around those entities that you already have. Duh. So if you have a text post, for example, and it has links, you're just optimizing that graph and sending that. I'm sure day-to-day code monkeys laugh at me for this realization.
Sometimes I'm amazed at how much I know, and how many dumb things I do anyway, when it comes to this craft. And boy does AI give you a lot of dumb options, but I'm trying to get more out of it.
Sometimes the weirdest things bum me out. Right now, I'm quietly raging about house problems.
First off, in my ongoing issues with Tesla's shitty energy products, last week we lost power for an hour, and the battery kicked in. That's the first time since the switching bits (to isolate you from the grid) broke in July. Now the problem is that when the system goes off-grid, the solar fails to synchronize with the battery. (The TL;DR is that alternating current in US houses runs at about 60 Hz, so the solar inverters have to match that so the power can seamlessly flow between solar, battery and house.) When this happened, I was in a long chat session with various support people and they opened a support case. A few days later, the support case disappeared as if it never happened. Remember, it took them six weeks to fix the last problem, and prior issues in prior years took as long, if not longer. They're just the fucking worst. I detailed the problem in email, so we'll see if anything comes from that route. I doubt it. I'm sure I'll have to call, and they'll do everything they can to avoid the problem.
Also last week, the TVX valve on our downstairs AC broke, so it failed to cool the place down. This is very consequential for my office, which is the furthest from the blower and with the door closed, gets no residual cooling from the upstairs units. At the time, and what made me realize something was wrong, is that the blower ran the entire night and the system used about $15 worth of electricity blowing hot air around. The tech believed that the motor had to be replaced, which on this old crappy Lennox stuff has an integrated controller, thus the whole thing has to be replaced. But as they quoted a repair, it didn't exhibit the behavior, so I passed on it. Two days later, today, it did the same thing, running all night. When it's cooling, it does cool, but it gets stuck blowing even when the compressor outside is idle.
So all in, these HVAC repairs are going to cost nearly $2k. It's an awkward spot because replacing the whole thing would cost just under $8k, so it feels like throwing bad after good. We did replace the upstairs last year, with a correctly sized (larger) system that is far more energy efficient, using more than a third less energy. It works so well. That cost $6,500 after a $2k tax credit, which of course the fuckwads in Washington have repealed, so there's no getting that again. We just need the downstairs system to work for another five years or so, when we might bail from here.
Look, I'm acutely aware that I have the good fortune of being able to save for crap like this, but it's that category of stuff that just feels like evaporating money. It's not like new carpet or cabinets or something that you can use and enjoy. As a colleague once put it, these are "in the wall" improvements that you don't see, and those hurt. Then pile on the incompetence of Tesla Energy, and I hate that I can't just rip everything they put in out and get my money back. The solar plant, at least, hits its ROI point next year, meaning all energy after that is "free" relative to the cost of the system. I guess that's something.