Software Engineering, Tesla 2018-2025.
Idaho
Joined April 2008
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One more awesome finding from our time off-grid, and I thought I was going completely CRAZY 🤯
A few times during our first days off-grid, I noticed our “old” clocks falling behind. Only by a few minutes, but enough to notice.
We reset them, and they kept drifting. I asked around our group, and it turns out I wasn’t the only one. Wild!
After digging into the diagnostic data I’ve been pulling from our Powerwalls, the answer was right there: below ~85% charge, our off-grid frequency runs under 60 Hz (around 59.6–59.8 Hz in our data).
No big deal for most things, but clocks on stoves, microwaves, etc. count AC cycles to keep time. At ~59.7 Hz, they lose about 7 minutes per day! ⏰
Phones and anything network-synced are unaffected. Just the old-school appliance clocks.
Check out the data coming from the Powerwall! You can see right where the charge surpasses 85%.
Who knew?
⏱️ And with that, we have a time!
After 124 hours off-grid with our Tesla Solar & Powerwalls, we’re flipping the switch back on.
Why? What did we learn? 👇
Tesla has created an amazingly integrated home energy package that lets you become your own microgrid with the push of a button. It’s incredible, and quite honestly feels too easy! We did some minor rationing, but nothing uncomfortable, and nothing we couldn’t have kept up for weeks or months.
Tomorrow at 2:30 PM PT, we pull the plug on the grid. No end date.
Just the sun, @Tesla Powerwall + Powershare, and stubbornness to see how long we can last. ☀️🔋
We built a live leaderboard, so you can watch every minute of it.
👉 stormcontrol.app/offgrid
My setup:
☀️ 14 kW solar
🔋 2 Powerwalls (27 kWh)
⚡ Cybertruck with Powershare @teslaenergy
🚙 Model Y
Late October here in Idaho means short days, gray skies, and cold nights.
Going head to head with @PatchesHQ and @JoshuaThePilot.
We ran into one issue, and it’s the main reason we’re going back on-grid before our reserves are actually depleted. As shared earlier, our solar generation has been erratic. Tesla and our installer are looking into it, but there’s no fix yet. We’re losing an estimated 35% of daily production, which is exactly the energy we’d use to charge our vehicles and keep them from slipping in SOC each day.
You can really see our charge curve suffering compared to a normal curve (see image).
I ended up writing a local scraper to pull extra diagnostic data from the Powerwalls to see if anything jumped out (certain strings, certain inverters, etc.), and nothing was obvious. And yes, I had Grok take a look too! One thing we did notice: one of our Powerwalls is in a “calibration” state that won’t complete until we’re back on-grid. Could that be the cause? I guess we’ll find out!
In the end, we have a few big charging demands coming up in the next 24 hours. Without full solar production the last few days, plus the incoming weather, we’d likely be hitting Superchargers before we got far on our trip. It’s also time to turn on the hot tub, and warming that fella up is about a 60 kWh initiative (if I remember right from last year).
This has been super fun, and I’m very appreciative of everyone who followed along! Thanks to @JoshuaThePilot for reaching out and asking if I’d like to participate, @EdInTheBush for making this an international competition, @PatchesHQ for by far the cleanest and most terrestrially armored Cybertruck of the bunch, and @haiway for giving us some of the most dramatic Powerwall SOC swings!
Once we have solar production resolved, who knows, we may have to do this again 😎
Today, another WOW moment with FSD v14.3.12👇
@cybertruck decided today it was going to start backing into the garage (after auto-opening as we approach) with perfection.
Previously, I would have to take over to make the right turn and pull in.
Combined with the garage door automatically opening and closing, these final touches to the trip start/ends are really getting refined. Great job @TeslaSI!
My #1 intervention on FSD is home parking.
I think we'll need some ability to either instruct (via Grok?) or map out the route to take into a parking spot.
In my case, the garage door already automatically opens via the myQ integration - but while our Model Y goes straight at this Y in the driveway, the Cybertruck needs to go right and turn 180 degrees to pull into the shop.
The final pile was dealt with today.
Probably half a winter worth of firewood stacked & getting ready to heat the house next year.
Pretty cool how good @bot is at random tasks.
Here's a look at the trees I dropped yesterday.
I snagged two timelapses of the general time period from our Unifi Protect system - then told Grok to align & combine them. Bada-bing!
More sun on the panels, too ☀️
Lots of questions lately about our power setup and what the two ATSs do. Here's the quick diagram!
Four layers deep: grid, solar, Powerwall, generator. House and shop fail over on their own with direct bypass options.
How does yours compare?
🔋111+ hours into our off-grid challenge (stormcontrol.app/offgrid), and so far it’s been pretty smooth sailing. We’ve had a few weather scares, but today is really the day we start pushing the limits of our capacity, with rain expected over the next 2 days.
☀️The solar array still isn’t producing at full capacity (we’re still dealing with the erratic output while off-grid). Tesla is still looking into it, but we don’t have a clear answer yet on what’s going wrong.
🤓I ended up building a custom collector that pulls all the diagnostic data out of the Powerwalls on the local network, similar to what an installer sees in real time in the Tesla One app. The data very clearly shows there’s an issue, but from my cursory read, it doesn’t pinpoint where it lies. Any guesses?
If you haven’t considered taking yourself off-grid for an extended period to test your systems, your backup, and your process, it’s completely worth it! The time to find any hiccups is when you can conveniently flip back to the grid if needed, not during a real outage.
87+ hours off-grid, and we’re still going!
Yesterday brought a surprise sunny day after an overcast forecast.
🚨 We uncovered our first issue in the system! Something is preventing us from capturing all the available sun into the Powerwalls or home usage. Even well below 50% charge, solar generation is erratic and jumpy. The screenshot shows the Powerwall discharging mid-day, in full sun, to cover home loads while we’re generating under 2 kW of solar. A few minutes earlier, that number was well over 8 kW.
Tesla and our installer are both looking into it, but you can see how much sun was missed under the curve! Hoping for a fix soon!
🔋 Pretty incredible that even with this issue, we haven’t had to touch Powershare on the @cybertruck. That’s all built into my own energy automation system, which predicts 7+ days of off-grid capacity even with the incoming forecast. We shall see 😎
🚗 We added a mileage tracker to the leaderboard, so you can see how much each of us has driven as part of the overall energy demand picture.
stormcontrol.app/offgrid
Rain and clouds are in the forecast, plus upcoming travel. Probably a good thing, because so far @teslaenergy has made this too easy!
@PatchesHQ @EdInTheBush @JoshuaThePilot @haiway
Pretty cool how good @bot is at random tasks.
Here's a look at the trees I dropped yesterday.
I snagged two timelapses of the general time period from our Unifi Protect system - then told Grok to align & combine them. Bada-bing!
More sun on the panels, too ☀️
Eric Mann retweeted
This is why I purchased a Foundation Series CT. It has powered our home through Hurricane Milton and numerous power outages. That piece of mind is so valuable, especially when you have the number of animals we have and require power for running water.
9 Powerwalls worth of energy storage for the cost of 5, and you get a free self-driving truck with it!
@cybertruck is the deal of the century.
