In this video I'll take you through our
solar pv
and Tesla Powerwall 2 performance for
August 2020
along with our Tesla Model 3 and Kona
electric costs and usage.
I also have an update on the phantom
power drain video that I did.
So stay tuned.
Hi John here and welcome. In this video
I'll take you through our solar pv and
Tesla Powerwall 2 performance for the
month of August 2020
plus the usual stats and usage
information on the Tesla Model 3
the Hyundai Kona electric and the my
energy eddie and zappi
and uncle Tom Cobbly an' all!
Also stay tuned to the end of this
video as I'll give you an update on some very
interesting news around the phantom
draw power issue that I've been having
from the grid.
I and many other SMETS2
electric smart meter owners and Tesla
Powerwall 2
owners have been experiencing
and it's actually a very positive
outcome. So yeah stay tuned to the end
for that.
In other events in August... it was
about
10pm on Thursday the 27th
our electric smart meter basically died.
Well more accurately the comms hub.
All the little LEDs
indicated deadness. They're normally
flashing constantly like a router,
or a network switch, or something like
that. But now they flash in unison every
5 seconds or so rather than their normal frantic activity.
This affected initially both the gas
and the electric data
and our in-house display was showing
'waiting for current data' 
which it was doing for
quite some time.
I've seen this message before and it
normally corrects itself within 24 hours.
So I waited until the next day next day
arrived, still nothing. The In-house display
was showing the same message.
So I moved the in-house display nearer
to the meter as the data is transferred over a wi-fi
signal generated from the smart meter
and the HAN (Home Area Network)
and no change. So I reported the problem
to Octopus Energy
early Saturday and sent them a direct
message a DM via Twitter. Which they
responded to very quickly
and they said they would pass it on to
their metering team to investigate, it
would be about a week.
The gas readings then miraculously sort
of reappeared the same day
and I don't think the two were connected
it was
just a coincidence, but still no electric
readings.
And if I log on to my online account
with Octopus Energy I can only see
electric data up until Wednesday the 26th and then
nothing afterwards. Meaning that the
data's not getting through to Octopus
Energy either. So it looks like the readings aren't
getting through. 
You know... I'll just have to wait
basically. The gas is actually showing
correctly.
Ironically, not that we're using any gas
at the moment,
but at least it's recording the data and
we're still getting electricity so
that's fine.
Just not recording the half hourly usage
and therefore won't be working out how much I've been
using / saving.
Thankfully for August stats it's okay
I've managed to work out the data for
that.
September might be a little bit more
tricky ,talk more about that later.
Between filming this and
preparing this video
I've received a reply from Octopus
Energy and they've actually arranged for
an engineer to visit to perform a power
cycle of the electric meter.
And this is booked for the 6th of
October which was their earliest
appointment.
So just over a month away, so as I say
September's video might be
slightly interesting because i won't be
able to record everything
as I have been doing. But hey ho we'll
cross that bridge when we come to it.
So let's get on to August performance.
In the description down below there's a
list of all our components in our system
so please have a look down there if
you're not familiar with our system
and our setup. Our monthly
PV solar PV generation chart, I'll bring
that up for you.
So in August we produced a total of 702kWh from our 2 separate
arrays and we had an average daily solar
generation of 22.7kWh for the month.
And as you can see the total is not
great. Almost the same as
what we achieved in March but absolutely
nowhere near April, May, June or July's
totals. It was a wet grey month certainly around
our parts and separated in two parts
really, as you'll see when we have a look
at the day to day in a bit.
The solar PV totals for both arrays,
let's have a look at that chart. So our
4kW array produced 440kWh
and our new 2.34kW array produced
263kWh
As I said, August was a month of mixed...
I'm sure I say that every month
actually thinking back about it. But it
was certainly
sunshine and showers for August.
Let's have a look at our percentage of
contribution to the Powerwall and solar
to our overall house is self-power.
We started the month on self-power mode
on the Powerwall
and that ran up until 8 45am on the
13th of August.
Very precise only because I wrote it
down.
The 13th & the 14th was predicted to
be
rainy, overcast with very little sunshine.
Those predictions did actually turn out
to be very accurate
the weather was so changeable for the
rest of the month that I kept
the Powerwall on cost-saving mode to
ensure there was enough charge in the
battery to power the house
during the peak period of 4 pm to 7 pm.
So in short we started...
started the month in self-power and then moved to
cost-saving mode in the middle of the
month and kept it on cost saving mode
for the rest of the month. And
probably will keep it on cost saving
mode now till the end
of... well until Spring next year!
The Powerwall was great at delivering a
constant 5kW
which means we can do cooking
during the peak
period without worrying about pulling
from the grid.
We're on the Octopus Energy Agile tariff
and often the price of a unit of
electricity during peak is around 25 to
30 pence per unit of electricity.
Therefore it's good to know that we
don't actually have to use the power
during those expensive times. And you
know that's the idea of the
Agile tariff is to move your usage away
from that peak
time when it's most expensive and in
highest demand.
So for August we were 77% self-powered
with a combination of the Powerwall and
our solar panel contributions.
And of that 77%,  50% of it came
from a solar and 27% came from the Powerwall.
You can clearly see on this chart the
drop in solar production here
10% down on last month.
The Powerwall did a good job between
managing our power usage between peak
and off peak.
And let me just show you that chart...
This is the the monthly percentage
Powerwall self-powered for peak
and off-peak times. The months are along
the bottom, and they're only populated with data
when we're actually in cost-saving mode with the
Powerwall. So this allows me to track how effective
the Powerwall has been during that peak
time.
As you can see we were 98% self-powered
during peak time
of 4 pm to 7 pm over the month.
Well I say over the months over from
when we moved across to cost saving mode from self-powered mode.
At off peak rate the Powerwall was able to
supply the house for
50% of the time, well 49%
of the time to be totally accurate. If we
look at the year-on-year chart for our
PV panels. For August it goes back to
2012.
The totals for years 2012 to 2019
will be for the 4kW system and
the 2020 figure is for both arrays. If you
recall we had the original 4kW
array that produced 440kWh
for August.
Actually as you can see there if you
compare the like-for-like, the 4kW against the other 4kW
on the previous years. It's our second worst year since records began!
So yeah not great!
So look at the Powerwall in and out. The
Powerwall had a
a roundtrip efficiency of 88% for the
month.
And if we look at the lifetime we have
89% round trip efficiency which is just
slightly under what Tesla recommends
at 90%.
Within the month we store 248kWh into the battery
and pulled or supplied 217kWh.
Let's move on have a look at the day by
day chart.
This chart gives you more detail as it
shows the day-by-day breakdown.
The key, or legend, is blue is our
house usage.
Yellow is solar generation, red is pulled
from the grid,
and orange is excess exported to the
grid.
And just have a look at those yellow
bars which represent the solar.
We had a great start up until the
12th of August as I said in my
introduction then basically disaster. That's the day I
swapped from self-powered mode to cost saving
mode on the Powerwall because it was predicted to
be very very poor from the 12th
onwards, and that sort of carried on for
the rest of the month.
The solar was not great as you can see.
Many days with low generation
it really takes a hit on your month's
total if you've got
the majority of the days towards the
back end of the month, or half the month
with very low solar generation.
And as a result poor solar generation
means
more grid pull. And you can see that
happening in the red columns
from the 13th onwards. Again
that's the Powerwall pulling from the
grid during off-peak to charge up the
battery
or the Powerwall deciding to power the house from the grid
again during off-peak.
So let's have a look at our overall
totals. So this gives us our overall totals
for the four data sources we just looked
at in the day-to-day.
The house usage is the key one I
guess to look at and compare. 
860kWh the house
consumed during the month.
We've already looked at the solar
production totals.
And we're about to look in more detail
the grid import and export, so I'm not
going to go into those
details there, but at least you can see
the four sets of figures.
I guess the takeaway is that solar
didn't provide all the requirements that
the house needed, in short.
Let's move on to have a look at the grid
usage then. This chart looks at our
daily average grid and house usage.
Our average
daily usage was 27.7kWh
and on average each day we pulled 7.7kWh
from the grid. Average grid pull was up due to lower
solar production,
and a trend that's undoubtedly going to
increase over the coming months as we head
towards Autumn and Winter.
This chart looks at what we sent to the
grid and we sent 95.7kWh of
excess solar generation back to the grid
in August.
Most of that was in dribs
and drabs over each day. So it wasn't a
big
excess that we couldn't use. Often
everything was charged, the hot water
was hot and charged by the eddi and the cars
were also charged up. as well. So it was
really true excess, it was just happened
at the wrong times.
This chart is the monthly total from the
grid. So in August we pulled a total of
239kWh from the grid,
which is twice as much as we did in July.
We did a couple of long trips in the
Tesla
which meant we charged from the grid.
Plus our
glass workshops have started up again in
August.
Which meant the glass kilns were on more
frequently overnight
on the cheaperAagile tariff rate because
we knew we wouldn't get any solar
during the day to be able to run them
purely from solar power.
If we have a look at the eddi which
heats our hot water.
In the month of August the eddi
diverted 54kWh of
solar excess energy to heat our hot
water. That gives us a year-to-date total
of 308kWh. With a total cumulative since its
installation on the 22nd July 2019
of 381kWh. I've taken the cost savings there at
five pence per kilowatt hour
which is probably a little low if i'm
honest. The average agile price is around
eight pence per kilowatt hour. So you could sort of work out the savings that way.
That's the savings that are
listed there.
Let's move on and have a look at the
zappi. So the August stats for the zappi are
for two cars.
Th Tesla's actually gone a bit mad this
month!
We've covered 731 miles in the month
which brings its total to 5,150 miles.
Still very low mileage because it's
almost a year old. Well it was actually a
year old on the 28th of September.
And I will be doing a video on that of
12 months of ownership.
So watch out for that. The Kona covered
131 miles in a month
and now has a total mileage of 10,188 miles.
Both cars had some public charging. The
Kona had one session at a Podpoint
in Rushden Lakes which was a free vend
and added 12.8kWh.
The Model 3 had two supercharging
sessions, at what now must be my favourite location...
Barnsley Supercharger stalls, it's a
two stall
charger at Tankersley Manor hotel near
Barnsley.
It's quiet, it's tucked away, and it's
very convenient when we're visiting
Jill's mum up in Rotherham.
The two
charging sessions on the superchargers
added 82.2kWh
to the Tesla and the two
trips there and back headed 480 miles to
the total figure for the Tesla.
So it's really been a rocking month for
the Tesla in August with a lot of miles
on it
by comparison to previous months where
we had done
very little. Charging on the zappi at home
we've added 198.52kWh
and that's all gone to the Model 3,
the Kona
was not charged at home for the month.
Basically,
and we still had a high state of charge
from the previous month at around 75%
can't remember the exact figure
and because it doesn't suffer from
phantom drain, once it's charged it sort
of stays at that temperature...
temperature! ...at that percentage of charge. And as as there we didn't use it very
much so it didn't really drop the state of charge.
I do seem to have a lot of phantom drain
in my life though. So the Tesla
has phantom drain, the Tesla Model 3,
and also our grid has phantom drain.
Hey ho. So let's have a look at costs now.
As you can see here I've split
between grid and green energy for solar.
So it was 69% green energy and 31%
grid energy. The cost for that
was £3.66 to pull from
the grid for those 60.34kWh.
Works out at 6p kilowatt hours.
And finally i said in the intro I would give
you an update on progress on the phantom
power from the grid. So in short
if you're not familiar with this there
is a video for that up here, I'll link
that up there if you want to see the
full detail.
We're pulling power from the grid
even though we are showing as being
self-powered on the Tesla Powerwall
e.g we shouldn't be pulling from the
grid in those circumstances.
The video had over 130 comments, my most commented and talked about
video. So thank you all very much who took the
time to watch it to add your thoughts,
experiences, and data into the comments.
And who shared and liked. It was very very helpful to
promote the problem and the issue and get that video out
and the message out to a wider audience.
And it certainly seems to have done the
trick. Yeah really appreciate that, thank you
very much. I'm really pleased with the
reaction and the response that that
video has had.
I've also received a positive response
from Octopus Energy
and I quote... I'll bring it up so you can
have a look their original reply
was to my email to them which was a
question of whether I'm being charged
for reactive energy.
And their original reply didn't reach
me for some reason, so I reached out to
them again and then
I had a DM message from Phil who was
chatting to
on Twitter and he said...
"Found it, i replied to you on the 10th
of August at 4.36pm." And what he went on to say
was meters are reading active power the
issue isn't related to reactive power.
So all my theories are dashed!
We've done the tests and between us,
Tesla
and L+G. We're writing an article to
publish on our site
we will then be replacing meters and
applying credit.
Which is absolutely super news and I'm
really
eagerly awaiting the article to read up
about
what's the reason. But I guess,
reading between the lines, if they're
replacing the meter then there must be something wrong with
the L+G meter ,or how it's programmed, or
its firmware, or whatever.
Anyway we'll have to wait and see what
that's all about
in due course. But it is really good news
I'm really pleased with that and I will
do a follow-up video once I have more
information.
As well and how the smart meter fares
after
its power cycle. So it's all meters at the moment. So they're going to
do the power cycle on the 6th of October
to try and bring it back to life.
It may even end up being changed, I don't
know if it won't come back to life
and then there's whatever they're going
to do with the
um phantom drain and what impact that
has.
Be interesting to see how that all pans
out.
So there you go. Thanks for watching and
I'll see you on the next video.
All alright, take care. Bye
