Ownership Verified: Another Tesla lurking in the shadows...

Oh well... more pv panels for our balcony got delivered... they look great, but upon deconstructing the stack from the pallet, I found the bottom most one to look like this:
1682670577387.png
1682670591744.png


well... 🦆 guess I'll only put 4 instead of 5 panels up on the balcony then... makes it easier anyway :bangin:

edit: yes they have glass on both the front and the back (instead of a white/black plastic sheet) and thus show the actual PV on both sides and are actually transparent / see-through in like 5% of the area (basically the middle with the connectors and in between the actual pv cells).
 
let's update this thread for a change!
1686664619472.png

moar solar juice from the garage roof!
yes, that is fixed to a literal curbstone, two in fact. cheapest ballast one can get (48kg for 3,90€) with the added bonus that having one lying down, one standing upright, i have a nice 15° or so slope to my PV panel. lovely. the glas-glas bifacial panel with ~10% transparency also looks very nice from the back - since another 4 of those will replace the rotted balcony railing wood planks, that'll look super sweet.
1686664802866.png


what ain't sweet is that my home charger seems to have developed a defect... or whatever you may call it. it started out very seldomly, but now, every third time I plug in, the DC fault current detection will trigger the fuse. I can just put the fuse back and it'll start charging without issue straight away after that, though. and I don't have any issue with the car or the cable at any other charging station - plus: the charger didn't use to do this, at least only like once a month or something. definitely starting to get annoying now. I've written to the seller / manufacturer to see what they think - maybe they'll just replace it with the new version that also does automatic 1-/3-phase switching and doesn't look quite as crap :D

edit on this last one: seller is trying to be scammy, wants me to talk to the manufacturer. no dice, law says they have to take care of the product they sold me - fair enough, you get a nice letter in legal gibberish then. ugh.
 
Last edited:
loose_unit said:
I am definitely going to need to check that out in person before I do the solar on my house... That is some years off still though
Click to expand...
Any time! I'll update here once I'm actually finished and the whole thing is legal (ish) :p
eizbaer said:
edit on this last one: seller is trying to be scammy, wants me to talk to the manufacturer. no dice, law says they have to take care of the product they sold me - fair enough, you get a nice letter in legal gibberish then. ugh.
Click to expand...
UPDATE ON THIS SHIT
after i exchanged 5 emails with "customer happiness" of that seller wihtout getting anywhere, i dropped a bunch of 1star reviews on trustpilot and suchlike and suddenly got a response. actually TWO responses.
first: from the manufacturer. seems the seller did actually contact them on my behalf.
second: from the seller, with an RMA ticket and shipping label, telling me to send back the unit then.
... either one would've been fine by me, honestly, but - it's good that they actually went with both! becauuuuuse... after asking a random install related question, the manufacturer just said "yup, that thing is most certainly broken, please send it back via your seller to have it replaced" :bangin: yeah... fuckers.

now here's the fun part: the "old" unit that I have isn't made or sold anymore, so they will have to replace it with the new version. which is 200€ more expensive. hence, I fully expect the scammy shit shop to figure that out, keep the replacement unit they get and tell me "sorry, not made anymore, can't replace, here's your money back" and pocket the change.
also I fully expect the whole shit to take weeks, so I have actually ordered the follow-up model myself from a different shop (ofc). so if I do end up being surprised and sent the new version as a replacement after all, I'll be able to send that back and not lose any money either, so win win either way I guess? except for the two weeks of my life i lost by getting annoyed and worked up about those assholes. ugh.
 
ugh, seems like the seller is a right shit.
The usual procedure is 'here's a new item to replace the faulty one under warranty, and if the new one's more asspensive/fancier that's our problem"?

Atleast that's how we used to do it at Shell, in 80% of the cases we just swapped the entire device (since it's easier/cheaper to do rather than send a tech over who will lose a day trying to diagnose/solve the problem)
 
Yeah, to be honest that was exactly what I would've expected. Even spending time to troubleshoot the problem just isn't worth it in a case like this... the personnel cost involved in covering all the email correspondence with me must already cost quite a lot of money...

Where the seller is hesitant, which I can understand, is that they're technically required to also cover the cost of un- and -reinstall - which in a case like this, however, shouldn't really make that much of a difference either. First time install of a wallbox can be rather costly, sure, but replacing an existing one with a new unit is just disconnecting and reconnecting 5 cables. So maybe 1 hour of an electricians time + driving here. I'm not even requesting to have that cost reimbursed, since I'll just do it myself... (super illeeeeeeeeegal).

Funny thing: I complained to the consumer protection agency and one of their employees already called me today to ask for more details. He told me directly I was entitled to that electrician compensation and I told him I'll just see what happens now and I'd be in touch of the seller didn't behave...
 
1687171270650.png

Alright, replacement unit is up - which I just got on my own accord because I can't be bothered to wait for the scammy seller to actually replace the old one. which he probably won't anyway, since the new replacement is more expensive, i.e. they can make more money just reimbursing me and selling the replacement unit. The switch took all of 10 minutes (different base plate, but same screw pattern) and half of that was opening up the cable to have enough slack in the individual leads to actually connect them. still fugly (that SPLOTCH on the left is actually a fly and the pink LEDs is a firmware update), but looks much better than the old one, for reference:
eizbaer said:
Update: the charger is up! It’s a bit fugly, but I don’t care.
Click to expand...
Also: it seems to work (charged a total of 0.6 kWh since making the switch).
 
eizbaer said:
Also: it seems to work (charged a total of 0.6 kWh since making the switch).
Click to expand...
Update: old one definitely was defective - this one hasn't missed a beat since I installed it last month.

Also: driving off from Aldi after half an hour's shopping there today I was greeted by "rear motor deactivated" and "speed limited to 56km/h".
[teslabjörn shiiieeeeeeeeet.gif]
anyway, drove the 2 km home at what felt like zero power and regen, parked in the drive, unloaded my shit, got back in to put the trolley-euro back, stepped on the brake... and all is back to normal. oh well. i was already going "lucky i have the AWD" hurrrr... stupid software bullshitting me.
 
Alriiiight so that did not in fact fix itself! I can sort of make it go bye bye by forcing a reset BBC changing the wheel configuration, but it’ll return one I park the car. Luckily got a service center spannend on Friday already and do hope they’re able to fix it directly…
 
Ok... so they plan to replace the entire rear drive unit inverter. covered by warranty, so I'm not out 2.500€. nice. not so nice: first schedule was for that to take a week (!). then I got a message from them that sadly no loaners were available, so I complained and then said "yeah we'll fix it same day friday". arrive there and they say "oh no, it's gonna be monday". so no car for the weekend... i don't actually care, but it's still about 1:15h to the service center by train and folding bicycle.

funny thing about the service shenanigans... since they do it all through the app. basically you drive there, hit a button in the app "check in for service" and just bugger off. you're not supposed to even talk to anyone. stupidly enough, the I hit the damn button, and the app told me to drive the car over to a different parking spot on the lot... but I couldn't drive the car anymore! the second you hit that button, be it on purpose or on accident, when you're close enough to the actual service location, it'll put the car in service mode which enables PIN to drive... locking you out of driving your own car any further. so... just a heads-up, for anyone who hasn't had the luck of going through this crap. at least I could still open the car and get my stuff, including the bloody folding bicycle, otherwise I would've been stuck in DĂĽssel-bloody-dorf for another half hour or so because buses suck balls.
 
SO ANYWAY they put a new rear motor inverter in... which took them 3 days for some reason. the invoice only contains about 5 hours of actual work, which I don't pay, thanks to the warranty. Car feels exactly the same as before, nothing has changed, except that it now works as it should without limiting me to 56kph. we'll see... it was quite a sight to see the car with the entire rear axle (and stuffs) taken out. wasn't allowed to take a picture though.

in any case, the whole service process going entirely through the app feels weird af. also returning the loaner car... you just park it there, ditch the keycard in a mailbox and drive off in your car. don't talk to anyone, don't do anything. just leave. i mean sure, it's efficient and all, but it feels a bit sus.

edit: as stated in joe's thread, i'm happy i got a 3 and have zero regrets not having/getting a Y (completely ignoring the 3+ year additional wait for that).
 
OKAY after a bunch of faffing about they managed to give me the password to couple Charger and Solar inverter… ffs.

On a positive note though: it actually works as I expected it to, and rather well!
IMG_1596.jpg


From this morning.
It automatically changes charging power according to solar excess.
It automatically switches from 1 phase to 3 phase.
Charging resumes without issue after a whole night of pause.

Nice.
 
eizbaer said:
OKAY after a bunch of faffing about they managed to give me the password to couple Charger and Solar inverter… ffs.

On a positive note though: it actually works as I expected it to, and rather well!
View attachment 3570144

From this morning.
It automatically changes charging power according to solar excess.
It automatically switches from 1 phase to 3 phase.
Charging resumes without issue after a whole night of pause.

Nice.
Click to expand...

What I’m interested in, is the solar charging/battery bank enough to run the baking oven or cook top in your kitchen?
 
93Flareside said:
What I’m interested in, is the solar charging/battery bank enough to run the baking oven or cook top in your kitchen?
Click to expand...
Yes, perfectly fine.

The highest actual power (sustained over more than an hour or so) from solar I’ve seen has been about 8.5 kW, the battery only goes up to 5.6 kW or something and the inverter (which handles both) tops out at 10 kW.

The oven takes 3.6 kW max, but only for a very short time, the cook top theoretically does 7.2 kW… but won’t ever go that high in regular usage (and, again, only for a very limited amount of time).

Example of a mostly grey and rainy yesterday (for comparison: today is already at 30 kWh produced), where I started making pizza at ~17:30h (300°C and heating up a large slab of steel, hence the long power draw). You can see nicely when I got home (15h) and when the car paused charging in between because of too little PV excess… and later, well, I turned the oven on and took the power away.

IMG_1601.jpeg

2kW spike at 22h is our quooker, since we usually make a bunch of tea (2-3litres, so pretty much the entire quooker tank) to cool down overnight.
4kW spike at 5h is the heat pump - that should also sort itself out once we have a similar connection installed as the charger uses (it just tells the heat pump „there is too much solar, just go nuts up to 10°C above target temperatures“ to fill up the hot water tanks).
 
Very Unteresting and nerdy. Still unsure how your charger can read the actual car % and give you this info, I thought this info was locked by the car manufacturer? I have an app linked to my charger (that can give me kwh charged and time connected) and a car app (that gives me %), but nothing that gives me all the info.
Also, for some reason my charger app doesn't give me charge speed (which is silly, because it's easily calculated if you know both the kwh and the time). Supposedly it's a flat charging curve but I kinda wanna know when it's loadbalancing if/when I use the stove/washing machine/dishwasher...

I don't have solar yet, but would love this kind of details. (I also have a "dumb"/analogue electricity meter so I can't nerd out over this kind of info yet).

Can you manipulate your hardware so you have x% of charge in the car, regardless of whether the sun shines/you get production?
 
NooDle said:
Still unsure how your charger can read the actual car % and give you this info, I thought this info was locked by the car manufacturer?
Click to expand...
oh, yeah the picture is a bit misleading that way... the battery % that is shown in the graph there is the SOC of my home battery in the basement (hence the nice slow drop in SOC through the night). the charger / system doesn't know anything about the cars SOC, since the communication between car and charger doesn't carry that, as you correctly wrote.
NooDle said:
(I also have a "dumb"/analogue electricity meter so I can't nerd out over this kind of info yet).
Click to expand...
funny stuff, this... while i do have a digital two-way-meter that does have an interface, it is not used by the PV system - because that meter is hot garbage. instead, the grid-meter goes directly into ANOTHER digital (and much "faster") meter, which the PV system uses to charge/discharge battery, get the consumption etc. it's a bit daft... but i think every inverter manufacturer figured out it's actually easier to provide their own meter rather than try and get the data from a random grid meter.

NooDle said:
Can you manipulate your hardware so you have x% of charge in the car, regardless of whether the sun shines/you get production?
Click to expand...
kinda sorta yeah-ish. what I can do is tell the charger to always charge at least X kWh until Y o'clock, regardless of solar. the idea is to have this set to cover your commute or whatever by 6 in the morning (usually... I think this only works if there is a reliable "night" period, because the charger doesn't know about the solar prognosis and will then just wait until nightfall and then follow that by 11 kW until X kWh is reached). I could also just temporarily override the settings, even with a button on the actual charger. plus, there is a setting "for current session", so i don't have to manually go back afterwards).
 
IMG_1646.jpeg

Have another picture showing how well this actually works! I am still surprised tbh… there’s a slight jump between 3.6 and 4.2 kW because that’s the difference between max 1 phase (16A) and min 3 phase (6A) power, but that’s buttered (perfect autocorrect, that stays!) away by the battery (as is any difference between actual solar generation and the full A steps in charging power).
Today, car was full at noon, so the basement battery gets filled up (at 5.6 kW max), the rest goes to grid.
 
This is awesome, exactly the kind of setup I'd love. Cover as much of own usage as possible, dump the overproduction into car and house batteries, only dump overproduction to grid when nothing else can use it on-site. Then cover night and other low- or no-production times from house battery.
 
Very unteresting this. I’m currently not yet in the position to do this for many reasons

- digital kwh counters : don’t have one yet.
- solar : don’t have it atm, also my house (or the earth) is badly positioned for them
- putting electricity back into the grid would yield a ridiculous fee (0,05€, while using electricity from the grid costs like 0,45€)

So, not for me yet, but unteresting nonetheless.

How much do ze Germans charge for energy/pay for sending it back to them anyways?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top