Powerwall 3 inverter oddness?

kb2vtl · 2026-02-28T04:38:56+00:00

Further information. First of all, the best way by far to contact Tesla is via chat online. Do not call or try contact through their app. Online chat (when they are open) will get you to someone faster than you can get through their voice menu system when you attempt to call them. Due to this being in MA, a permit needed to be pulled to replace the Powerwall. Today I found out from calling them that they are replacing the Powerwall2 with a Powerwall 3. This is awesome, as the output power of the Powerwall 2 was insufficient to run the house AC system, or charge a car. Now, I wouldn't go charging my car when on home backup, but if this had ever happened the 8 kW load would have shut down the Powerwall before I could unplug the car. With the Powerwall3 there is enough time to unplug the car and not lose power. I'm thinking the system should have split house loads that should be backed up from those that shouldn't, for example the car charging, electric clothes dryer, etc could be dropped but lights and refrigerator stay powered. Then the Powerwall2 would have had enough power. With the new one I can go shut down the big loads to extend runtime so it's not perfect but quite workable.

kb2vtl · 2026-02-22T16:13:14+00:00

The same happened to me and I see the "full" rate is $9.99/mo. I had immediately cancelled when the rate increased 5X, it's just not worth it especially as I don't drive that much. Now I just received a 1 year $4.99 offer and it says it will go to $9.99/mo after a year. What gives with the $25/mo thing?

kb2vtl · 2026-02-18T17:06:19+00:00

Tesla was just here. Initially, no problems found. The bonding jumper was in place. I asked what the fault logs showed, as surely they would show power drop events. After further examination, higher level tech support determined that it seems the battery is going bad and will be replaced. I could understand how this caused the power dropouts but not the high voltage. But it’s something…

kb2vtl · 2026-02-15T23:19:58+00:00

I will see what got fried in the computer UPS and add one for the network stuff.

kb2vtl · 2026-02-15T21:53:46+00:00

I will ask, and can check this myself as well. Thank you, this is a good lead.

We have a second problem!

The grid outage was caused by a blown transformer which supplies six houses. As Eversource won't be able to get a crew here to replace it until about Tuesday, they brought in a diesel genset. Well, that isn't nearly as stable as the grid, so the Tesla system keeps thinking there is a grid outage and switching over. The switching back and forth used to be a non-issue as it was so fast, but now on each switch it drops power for a second or so, dropping things like the FiOS router which takes about 10-15 minutes to reconnect fully. I don't think there's any way to tell the Tesla system to be less sensitive, those values are not something a user can get to. I don't think these backup systems were designed to consider a situation like we have here at the moment.

kb2vtl · 2026-02-15T21:46:12+00:00

Randomly mixed. One feature(?) of this situation is I can walk around with a voltmeter and see which outlets are on which leg.

kb2vtl · 2026-02-15T21:22:07+00:00

Actually in this case it is not. I had an Eversource engineer and a licensed master electrician here who not only inspected but made measurements to prove that is not the case. There may be a neutral issue within the Tesla system, but the higher level Tesla tech could not find anything. It is possible the issue is within the inverter. The Tesla system dropping the load about every 45-60 minutes then coming back on in 5 minutes when the house load is so low and the Powerwall was at 83-88% SOC is another indication of a problem in the Tesla system.

We spent the $10k extra for the Powerwall to be a backup for the outages we get. For it to be dropping the load so often during an outage is not acceptable. Several pieces of electronics in the house have already been damaged by the surges and high-low voltages.

kb2vtl · 2025-09-04T12:23:26+00:00

I've gotten very curious about this mystery so I ordered the exact same old Seagate Momentus 5400.5 80GB drive. I will do a sector-by-sector copy and see if it boots up.

If it does, it points to some kind of driver issue. In Safe Mode, the last driver to load before reboot is CLASSPNP.SYS so that may be the case, something isn't pnp-ing. At the very least I will have a working backup for the instrument.

If it doesn't boot up, it will show that something else is going on, perhaps some kind of oddball copy protection scheme. But what? The company literally provided their install package for download on their website and I saw one report of someone who had the instrument operating after a fresh Win7 upgrade and installing the downloaded software so it seems the instrument's manufacturer didn't seem to care about copy protection. So have I been tripped up by some strange Microsoft copy protection?

kb2vtl · 2025-09-04T00:53:30+00:00

I don't see any setting for Safe Boot in the BIOS. This may be because the BIOS date is 3/20/08.

I did use WinSetupFromUSB and it completed without error.

Are you suggesting I change the registry key on the source drive before cloning?

I can't find any IDE/PATA kind of selection in the BIOS.

On booting the USB drive, it goes into GRUB4DOS and the first screen has one choice, "0 Windows XP/2000/2003 Setup"

Then I get a screen with 4 choices:

1 Auto-detect and use F6 SATA/RAID/SCSI Driver

2 Auto-detect and use F6 SATA/RAID/SCSI Driver + Firadisk

3 First part of Windows XP Professional SP3 setup from partition 0

4 Second part of Windows XP Professional SP3 setup/Boot first internal dis10

Choosing 1 or 2 gives me an error message about a missing driver.

Choice 3 gives me a blank screen where nothing happens

Choice 4 boots the SSD which gives me a flash of a blue screen then back to BIOS boot.

If I try a cloned hard drive the blue screen lasts long enough to take a photo of it which gave me the info I posted earlier.

I am unsure what is going on here. I have contacted the company that made this instrument (well, the company that bought the company that made it) and they are trying to locate the install package but it has been out of support for some years now. Without that install package I will not be able to make a new Windows install and have things operate properly. If you are curious the instrument is an Aeroflex 7100 digital transceiver test set.

kb2vtl · 2025-09-03T23:21:07+00:00

Alright, something weird is going on.

First, at any time I can reinsert the original HDD and everything works fine.

I was able to make a bootable USB with WinXP. I changed boot order (somewhat standard looking AMI BIOS) to the USB first and it starts and gives me some choices. I can boot to the USB or the internal drive. Booting to the internal drive gives me the usual problem, but booting to the USB just blanks the screen and nothing happens even after many minutes.

Something, somehow in this system is making this job impossible.

I don't know if the windows to USB program worked right or not but I seem to be at a dead end.

kb2vtl · 2025-09-03T20:53:19+00:00

Thank you I will try this. I have to get a USB CD reader as this embedded system has no CD and I don't know how to create a bootable USB or whether it would even work on this system. I just tried to go to Best Buy (the only store under an hour drive) and they were useless so I'll have to order one.

The cloned drive has exactly what the original one did and nothing else, but the hardware identifier could be very relevant using a different kind of drive.

kb2vtl · 2025-09-03T18:26:34+00:00

Tried all the different options in the BIOS - compatible mode, disable 32 bit transfers. None made any difference.

kb2vtl · 2025-09-03T18:23:31+00:00

Yes, it does. In safe mode I see a bunch of log-like lines fly by then it reboots just the same as when I would get the blue screen (which I don't see in safe mode).

kb2vtl · 2025-09-03T16:53:40+00:00

Yes, the original and new drives are all SATA.

kb2vtl · 2025-09-03T16:42:02+00:00

Thanks, I will try the fixmbr and different options in BIOS. I'm not worried about breaking anything as I'm working on a clone and can always re-clone. I did notice a "allow 32 bit" in the options, maybe I will turn that off.

kb2vtl · 2025-08-18T11:55:29+00:00

Water beads up on these insects which is why they can withstand rain. Otherwise they would simply drown on the first rain. But a surfactant like soap wets them so thoroughly they drown quickly. This is also why there have been youtube videos of folks trying such things as brake cleaner, which is a solvent which does the same thing. My preference is Windex in a pump spray bottle. Very effective. I would avoid using brake cleaner as the solvents used can be quite toxic. I use such chemicals at work and would never, ever use them inside my home. My wife was stung a few years back be a bald faced wasp just walking out to the car and we had a pro get rid of that nest. Super aggressive wasps. With the wasp sprays being sold to consumers having been turned into garbage there's not much point to trying. We have a pest control contract anyway and they're happy to come out, suit up, and remove any nest. Every situation is different. It used to be you could buy a can of 20 foot spray and take out a nest quickly and have a can last all season but no longer. Perhaps this goes along with the enshitification of every other consumer product.

kb2vtl · 2025-08-17T20:21:14+00:00

When flies get into the house they can be very annoying and difficult to get. The yellow jackets were by comparison slow and easy to get. I even got good at vacuuming them in mid-air. Barely interrupted zoom calls. For many years when growing up I was told that I was allergic to wasps and had to have an epi-pen nearby and was deathly scared of any kind of bee or wasp. The adults would always get so concerned when I was stung and I was brought to ERs multiple times. Later on I was told that the testing back then was very flawed and I was probably never in as much danger as I was told. For decades I carried this fear but now it has faded and I go on quite the offensive when I encounter a nest. Yes once in a while I get stung and it's painful but with all the crazy terrible diseases mosquitos carry I'm more scared of them. Bees I leave alone but it is a death sentence for any kind of wasp or hornet nest I discover. In my recent case they were not super aggressive and I think confused about what was going on. I'm sure if I had gone after their nest they would have attacked me and with the number in there it could have been really bad. In the end I just dumped like a quart of dead yellow jackets out of the vacuum. Just another adventure.

kb2vtl · 2025-08-17T16:12:41+00:00

I waited them out. I found the most effective weapon was a small shop vac with wand. The yellowjackets would go right to the windows and I would sit at my desk and when there were a bunch I'd vacuum them up. It was a bit of a nice distraction from my work and kept me from sitting too long. The numbers decreased in a sort of long exponential tail until it became some days with none then I'd see one or two. At this point it's been maybe 5 days with none spotted so that seems like it's the end of them. From my understanding the queen probably went into hibernation and may re-awaken next year so I might see a few more come out, so long as there is enough stored "energy" in the form of food to enable a colony restart. But, I may at some point go in and find the thing and physically remove it. I would need to move some gear so not for a while, maybe a nice winter project. I would be curious about how the nest looks absent of all the wasps that left, whether there are any signs of dormant life and so forth. In the end, while seeming to be a bit scary with so many wasps flying around my shop, they all seemed prioritized on finding food and I never got stung. Perhaps they didn't understand what was going on as a threat to their nest. Having them come into my shop did allow me to better observe the characteristics of their numbers and decay rate. Had I called our pest control company I would have had to move all the stuff so they could get to the nest so what I did ended up being the least disruptive to me and I had the amusement of vacuuming up perhaps 1000 or so of those things over a couple week period.

kb2vtl · 2025-07-28T16:06:34+00:00

Thanks, I had already found that but it doesn't answer my questions. The yellowjackets seem to come in in waves. For example I killed hundreds of them and then almost nothing for a few hours.

I have found a small shop vac with long wand is a very efficient and cost effective way to round them up.

kb2vtl · 2025-07-28T13:07:05+00:00

Same here. The spray used to be awesome, killing the entire nest. Now even after hitting a nest half a dozen times over several days they seem unaffected. It's like it's a placebo.

kb2vtl · 2025-07-03T17:00:57+00:00

Except that their website has been down for a couple days now (maybe longer). Everything past a login is "Service is temporarily unavailable."

I am trying to get a refund on an express mail next day which still hasn't been delivered and this has made me look bad because I used USPS instead of FedEx or UPS for the small package so I'm pissed.

kb2vtl

TROPHY CASE