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.
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