There’s a lot worth mentioning from yesterday, so I’m going to break it all up into three posts!
As promised, Derrick and company ran a 12-foot Ethernet cable from the Energy Gateway to a powerline adapter on a wall outlet. I volunteered to do the indoor half of that myself, plugging in the corresponding powerline adapter (it was a bit bigger than I expected so we had to move some plugs around real quick) and connecting a 3-foot Ethernet cable (supplied by them) to the port we had freed up on our router by disconnecting the Xbox 360 we don’t use much.
But then they handed me the Home Gateway (that little black SolarCity-branded puck that had been sitting on top of my PowerWalls forever) and asked me to hook that up too! So we quickly disconnected our mixer (which uses an Internet connection to play streaming Internet radio), did some more plug shuffling and hooked that up.
That triggered a not-entirely-unwelcome chain of events where we ordered an 8-port switch to allow us to connect more devices to our network via Ethernet cables, then realized we had nowhere behind the TV to put the switch, then solved that problem by ordering a new wall-mountable TV we had been price-watching for the past six months or so. Downside is we just spent a few grand more this month than we had intended… but upside is we’re now getting a really nice TV! (Switches are way cheaper than the last time I bought one — we could have gotten a 16-port switch for less than $100! I remember when 8-port switches were well over that…)
I asked why we couldn’t just use Wi-Fi for the Energy Gateway and the PowerWall guy said the system actually uses three different communication methods to ensure maximum reliability — it will use the wired Ethernet connection, and failing that it will use Wi-Fi (he had me punch in my Wi-Fi password while we were talking), and failing that it will use the cellular uplink. I suppose I could have insisted that they stick with Wi-Fi but I figured we might as well set it up as-designed.
The Hickory Hill Solar Project 