Today I decided to unplug from the grid. Just plain turn off the power. It has been a very good eye opener. I was sent a
link to a video on YouTube for an off grid challenge. This guy has a similar setup as me so I decided I wanted to try it too. We did not build our system to be off grid, but want the ability to go off grid and handle long duration outages. What better time to try it than when there is no issue. I saw things in his video that I wanted to understand for myself with my setup and usage.
So I turned off the power at my main disconnects at around 2:45 this afternoon. We were at 100% charge on the Powerwalls and plenty of sunlight. I told my family to live life normally during sunup so we could see what happened with the grid down. So we lived life normally so far. When I turned off the grid the solar production stopped. I kinda knew this was going to happen but didn't really know why until later when I had to look it up, about 15 minutes later as a matter of fact. Why you might ask? Because the UPS connected to my network rack died and my network stack dropped. Why did this happen? Well I assumed it had to do with the power being clean but wasn't sure. Checking the outlets I still had 120VAC on them so the UPS had power to it but it refused to be powered from the outlet. I moved my power strips to the outlets directly (off of the UPS) and they all powered on normally.
Turns out the Gateway turns off the solar inverters by messing up the power with
frequency shifting. This article talks about it in better detail than I'm going to but it even mentions that some UPS won't accept power from the Gateway when it shifts the power frequency from 60Hz to 66Hz. I don't have a meter handy to check the frequency so I'm going to have to assume this is right. At least my assumption of clean power was right, but it was controlled "dirty" power. We did notice the microwave sounded funny as well as a few other things also mentioned in the article. One thing that wasn't was some of the cheaper LED bulbs wouldn't light properly with the shifted frequency.
So the solar production stayed off until we reached 85% charge on the Powerwalls. At that point it finally started production and we ran off of solar and the batteries as needed while the batteries charged to 98% (not 100%):
Here you can see a little while later we stopped solar production and were using the batteries again.
Now this was a little bit ago as we were settling in for the night.
We still have more than 50% charge right now though I did move my two A/C systems to non-essential to turn them off. This prolonged the batteries given they pull around 7kW combine when running. Tonight when we made dinner we actually over pulled from the Powerwalls (10kW max continuous) and lost all power briefly. Both A/C units were running as well as the microwave and other general circuits. So we moved one unit to non-essential (turning it off) and then later moved the second since we didn't really need it overnight. I've also learned at least two more circuits that I need to move to a different sub panel.
At this point we are 11 hours in and I've learned a ton about my system and even the technical aspects of some portion of it. I'm still thrilled!