Australian Tesla drivers who also own Powerwalls will soon benefit from a new feature update, when charging from the Powerwall in the event of a blackout.
The ability to charge off a Powerwall in an outage has been available in Australia for some months now, however the car’s charging demands would draw from the household load, which could cause issues if other high load appliances were being used and risked draining the battery.
The new update is part of the Powerwall 1.46+ update, and is now operational in the US for Model 3 and Model Y owners, but is not yet in Australia.
Put simply, if a Tesla vehicle is charging and there is a blackout event, it will honour the Powerwall threshold and halt charging once the state of charge of the Powerwall falls below a set threshhold.
“Basically this update helps when the grid goes down,” Tesla owner Adam Sloan, who owns both a Tesla Model 3 and a Powerwall, and documents his ownership tales at the TeslaStraya website, tells The Driven.
“So if you set a percentage – say 50% [of Powerwall state of charge] – it will balance your car charging versus solar and battery availability.”
To read the full version of this story – and view the photo gallery – on RenewEconomy’s electric vehicle dedicated site, The Driven, click here…
