On July 4, our energy gateway, which is basically a switch to manage solar, battery and grid electricity, stopped measuring the various inputs and outputs. What this means is that, in the event of a grid outage, we couldn't use the battery and solar. As a reminder, the reason this is necessary is so as not to back-feed power into the grid when line workers are potentially working on it. This is the second time it died, and possibly from lightning. Stuff happens. At least the solar was still being used, as I could see the utility meter spinning backwards, meaning our excess generation was going back to the grid.
But again, Tesla Energy is slow as hell. It's all under warranty, but getting them to actually dig into the problem and then schedule someone to come out and look at it took a total of six weeks. As with our previous experience, the techs who come out to do the actual work are fantastic. It's the dumb bureaucracy of the company that makes everything take forever. The last time was much worse, with call after call, being stuck off-grid, etc. Where I got lucky this time was that the tech happened to have the right part on his truck (the sensor module). He also proactively noticed that one of my inverters was not sending telemetry back to home base, which is used to measure the output guarantee of the solar. He didn't have any parts for that, but indicated that they'll work that problem separately.
The strange thing about wanting the backup is that we've used it exactly once, for a few hours, when Hurricane Milton came through last October. Most of the nearby infrastructure is underground, so it tends to stay up pretty consistently. Beyond that, it has kicked on during some minor brown-outs for a few minutes, but that was it. I guess it's like any property kind of insurance. You almost never need it, until you do.
I guess I could say that Tesla was better this time, but I wouldn't classify them as good. The only reason we used them for the solar was because the battery was going to be "free" from auto referrals a decade ago in our Model S days. I use the quotes because we still had to pay for the installation and extra hardware. I thought, cool, it'll all be one system, and it will share the app that the cars use. There are a ton of other vendors now and most of them use local installers who also provide support and maintenance.
My inner data nerd is also without six weeks of usage and generation data, which isn't great.
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