It’s been nine days of grid power outage here in Emerald Victoria. T

he community has pulled together to share resources.

Today I received an SMS from Ben to ask if he could charge at our place. I assumed it was another neighbour asking if they could plug their phone or laptop in to the power board we laid out in the porch. We were the only house in the street to still have power after the storm hit, thanks to our Tesla Powerwall battery. It’s been charging up each day from solar panels on the roof.

But Ben was actually after a place to charge his EV. I had forgotten about our listing on PlugShare during all of the neighbourhood blackout dramas.

I said yes, no problem. Today he had driven from his home in Packenham east to Sale, then back west and up the hills to Emerald, and has a few more nearby drives to do before returning home. The navigation said he would get home with 8% charge, but that wasn’t accounting for extra stops. So, he wanted to play it safe.

Charging:

He plugged in here for about ten minutes, drawing a max power of about 7.2kW from our combined battery and partial solar. The Powerwall battery actually started providing above its typical 5kW max, due to the limited solar. It is capable of 7kW bursts.

This is another reason why I want to get our solar to have all Enphase Energy panels (10kW) active during a blackout, not just one string (3.9kW). I’ve asked Lightning Energy about this and they are looking into it for me 👏.

After Ben left, I looked at my Tesla phone app. To my surprise, it shows the amount of energy specifically used for car charging, in red! That’s new! According to the App Store listing, this new feature seems to have been introduced a week ago. I haven’t noticed it. Perhaps Tesla has only just now activated it. I scrolled back to February 19 to see charging of our own car.

I also read today that Tesla will tomorrow enable in Australia the “Driving on Sunshine” ☀️ feature of the Tesla system, where it can ensure that only solar power is used to charge the car (not using grid power). This might mean that I’ll no longer need Charge HQ to do that.

I’m geeking out right now 🧐