It’s been wild 36 hours here in the Dandenong Ranges. Y

esterday afternoon, the power went out in our town of Emerald. We heard it was due to a fire somewhere.

We sent out a few texts to our neighbours to offer our battery backup power. We ran our heavy duty extension lead over the fence and set up a power board on the front porch for phone charging.

A few hours later, the grid was back up and running. But, the pending storm warnings made us cautious. Sure enough, an hour or so later, the storm hit. Heavy rain, pounding hail and strong wind.

Marvin the robot mower happily sits charging out in the rain. But I didn’t fancy the chances of his camera eyes surviving the hail stones. I used the iPhone app remote control to drive it under our pergola, while the ice golf balls bounced on the lawn.

Sure enough, the grid connection died again during the night, probably due to storm damage to power lines and other infrastructure. In the morning our neighbour reconnected to our power supply.

We inspected the hail stones that had formed a layer on our fish pond. In town, trees and powerlines were down, some roads were closed, and some petrol stations were unable to pump petrol (which requires electricity).

We also lost broadband. We had to funnel Internet through my iPhone on a windowsill at the “two bars” end of the house, relayed as a hotspot via wifi to laptops. In the afternoon, 24 hours after the outages started, a guy from AusNet arrived to connect a petrol generator to the NBN cabinet in our street. As you can see in the photo, it’s not far from our solar array and battery. I asked if there was any way in a future outage I could connect the NBN cabinet to my home battery, but he said “it gives us a job to do”. An hour later, grid power was restored. But the generator is still connected and humming on through the night 🤷.

Charging:

The Tesla app had warned us in the couple of days prior that storms were predicted, and that it was charging up the battery, just in case. When each of the outages hit, we had about 80% charge in the battery. Our car already had over 90% charge from solar power over the past few days.

Today was overcast with intermittent rain, but the solar panels still managed to generate enough energy for our day’s use (and our neighbours), with only a bit left over to charge up the battery. We elected to not turn on some appliances, such as washing, in case the outage continued through a second night and overcast day.

During a grid outage, our system is designed to keep powering the home, charging the Powerwall battery and our EV. However, the Enphase solar system reduces the active panels to 40%, which is a pain, limiting our ability to power when we need it most. I chased this up again today with Lightning Energy. The CEO replied today, so hopefully we’ll get this sorted.