PowerWall!

Yesterday Ryker and crew came out and continued working on the roof; they did the flashing that seals the joint between the garage roof and the wall of the second story of the rest of the house. I forgot to take a photo of that! I should also note that these guys are super polite; when I walked outside at one point every single one who passed me said “Good morning, sir!” I felt like the lord of the manor or something. Since they were only doing the flashing and one strip of waterproof membrane over top of that they finished work around 3 PM, although we actually thought they were still up there for quite a while because we were hearing the nailguns from a roofing project in the next housing development over.

But meanwhile, the big excitement was that the PowerWall guys showed up! They asked us to open the garage (we had to open the side door rather than the actual big garage doors because in the process of moving things away from the corner where the PowerWalls go we blocked off the main doors) and brought in some boxes with my name on them. They explained that they were going to have to turn the power off for about 6 hours while they installed the new equipment. They said the power was going off at 11:00am, and Ding! it went off right on the stroke of 11. They must have been waiting to turn it off until the time they said to make sure we weren’t caught unawares.

It actually turned out to be more like 4 hours, and when it was over they apologized for the long outage and said it would have been shorter except that when they disconnected the electric meter Manassas City’s electrical utility (our city has its own power company) noticed and sent somebody out to ask them what they were up to, then insisted they couldn’t turn the power back on until somebody from the utility came to inspect it. We didn’t notice it much since it was still well within the window they had warned us about. My wife was painting miniatures and I was working from home on my laptop which had just enough battery to last.

• Anyway, after all was said and done we have some neat new equipment to show off! Here’s what the corner of our garage looks like now.
• Upper left: our normal electrical panel
• Lower left: the “Home Energy Gateway” which is like the processor for this whole setup
• Lower center: a second electrical panel with breakers for the two inverters and the two PowerWall batteries
• Upper center: one of the two inverters that convert the DC power coming off the roof into AC power to feed my hungry gadgets. There are supposed to be two inverters but they only had one in-stock so the other one is coming — note the writing on the wall where it’s supposed to go.
• And last but not least the lower right is obviously our shiny new PowerWall batteries!

The box on top of the PowerWalls looks like a phone would come in it but it’s actually some part for the second inverter. At least, I thought that’s what he said, but when I snooped in the box just now (because of course I did) it looks like it’s meant to connect to my router and connect the system to the Internet. It’s SolarCity branded, which is funny. It’s just like my Nest Cams that says DropCam on them.

The crinkly white stuff in a semicircle on the front is one of those plastic films like is on the glass of a new phone when you get it, to protect it from scratches. I figured I would leave it on there until they install the second inverter just in case they bump a stepstool into it or something.

When the PowerWalls were first turned on they were humming/whirring at about the same volume as the refrigerator a few feet away from them, but every time I’ve gone to admire them since they’ve been silent. Maybe they were doing some kind of power-on self-test or something. They’ve got those concave vent ridges on both ends so I imagine they suck air in one side and vent it out the other. Also I have to say I thought they would take up a lot more room! I didn’t realize they could be stacked so close together.

Here’s the “disconnect” on the other side of the wall from all that:

Well, that’s enough ogling these babies for one day!