System Activation and Timeline
hey guys sean here from tesla family it is just about 5 47 a.m near sunrise on july 3rd one week after our solar panel installation we're ready to turn the system on on tuesday we passed the inspection and we received permission to operate from our utility yesterday and tesla also gave us go ahead turn the system on so it's going to be a beautiful sunny day today hot 95 degrees but i think we're going to generate a lot of electricity today let's go ahead and throw on the system and then i'll check back with you a little bit later on and we will see what we've generated today this is going to be our first full day of generating solar and i'm super excited let's go check it out
Project Timeline Overview
all right before we move into powering on the system i know you're all excited about that let's talk about the timeline leading up to today so we had our home assessment on february 12th of 2020 actually placed our order for the panels approved our order and approved our design on the 18th so if you're interested in the ordering process and the design process check out those two videos on my channel about uh three to four weeks after we placed our order that's when the kovid 19 pandemic really started to ramp up so we called tesla and had them put a hold on our order for a few months it wasn't until maybe mid-may until we proceeded ahead with our order and we were able to schedule installation for the 26th of june check out our installation video in our solar playlist after installation i had to make my first payment basically the first 50 was due and then we proceeded with the county inspection only a few days later about four days later we had tesla come over to our house and then they did actually a virtual inspection with the county with a county official who inspected all of our electrical equipment uh everything that tesla installed and then after we got approved for inspection it was only three days later when we got utility approval from our utility company here in maryland and that was our an approval to interconnect with the grid uh interconnect our solar panel system with the grid and after we got that approval we just made our final payment with tesla and now we're ready to power on the system so here we go let's do it
Main Panel Activation
all right for step one we're gonna go ahead and start here at the main panel we're gonna go and throw on our 40 amp circuit that was wired in by the installation team this says warning inverter output connection do not relocate this over current device it's our 40 amp breaker we'll throw that on all right that's step one
Powering On the Tesla Solar System
okay we're back outside again for step two we're gonna go ahead and turn on our ac disconnect switch here let's see here ac photo voltaic disconnect so i'm gonna go from off to on boom i feel like a bad scientist a little bit and on our inverter dc photovoltaic disconnect we're gonna go ahead and turn that from off to on you can see right now with three lights lit up so let's go ahead and turn the system on
System Startup Sequence
all right that is so cool now we'll let the system power up a little bit eventually we will see one solid green light or one blinking light when the system is ready to go these three solar lights just mean that the system is activating and we'll be good to go here very shortly here it is about a minute later and you can see that the three lights have gone out and now we're up to one green blinking light so i think once the once we start generating uh the green light stops blinking it turns solid green that's how we know that we're actually starting to collect solar energy but we have to wait for the sun to come out first very shortly
Kicking Off First Day Production
all right guys now let's take a look at my first day's production on the tesla app all right let's take a quick look at my first full day's production i'll be doing two hour time steps from 8 am to 8 pm on the left hand side is a photo tried to stay generally in the same location for each of these time steps on the right hand side a screen capture from my tesla app showing the production through the day hang on to the second half of the video and you will see i'll give you the full introduction of the tesla app all the different screens and different ways you can view the data which is super cool let's get going here on our first time step this is 8 o'clock in the morning you can see it's starting to catch some sun here on the solar panels half a kilowatt hour generated at 8 00 a.m
Morning and Midday Production Peaks
skipping ahead to 10 a.m and we've already jumped to five kilowatt hours look at the sunshine hitting the solar panels really love to see that let's go ahead and jump to noon and we've got nearly full sunshine here on all the panels we are generating at right around five probably a little over five kilowatts and a total generation through the day through noon of 14.4 kilowatt hours
Mid-Afternoon Production
by 2 p.m we've already generated 27 kilowatt hours you can see we peaked probably between noon and 2 o'clock uh right around 5.7 kilowatts even though the system is a 7.56 kilowatt system that's dc and there is a little bit of loss you can expect as you convert that to ac generally i could peak at a little over 6 kilowatts
Afternoon Solar Performance
jumping further ahead to 4 pm you can see the sun has moved to the western half of the sky not quite going down but you can see we definitely don't have full sun on all the panels and that's definitely reflected here in the app however we're already up to 35 kilowatt hours generated through 4 p.m and by 6 p.m you can see the sun is starting to set uh still a decent amount of solar we still pull in 2 kilowatts here around 6 pm and you can see the curve going down along with the sun there is a little dip there right around 4 p.m associated probably with a little bit of clouds that moved over my house but so far 41.3 kilowatt hours through 6pm we're still barely generating here at 8pm just 0.3 kilowatts but for the day we'll total it out at 42.4 kilowatt hours that's 10 kilowatt hours more than my july 2019 consumption which means we'll be pushing a lot of energy into the grid
Understanding Grid Interaction
let's take a look at my net meter now hey guys we're out here at my electric beater and i wanted to show you a couple of cool things real quick take a look at these two dashes on the bottom under the numbers they're moving rapidly from right to left that means we are generating electricity and whatever we don't use in our home we're pushing back into the grid the faster that they move the more energy we're pushing back into the grid turning our meter backwards
Generating Grid Credits
take a look at this next number here that shows six nines that means we've already turned our meter back to zero and we are in the negative now actually generating a credit that's a credit of one kilowatt hour and as we push more energy back into the grid we'll build that credit up we can use that later on uh any time really to charge my car or power our house
Morning Grid Usage and EV Charging
yeah the two dashes on the bottom now are moving in the wrong direction and we're actually pulling from the grid but it's the morning time and we're getting ready to leave on vacation you can see how fast they're moving i'm charging at 12 kilowatts using my high power wall charger charge jump to model 3. hopefully next month we'll build up a credit and we'll just be eating away that credit
Tesla App Tour: Real-time Monitoring
okay i wanted to show you one of the coolest parts about having tesla let's take a tour of the tesla app all right let's take a look at the tesla app for monitoring my solar panels all right this is the home screen what we're looking at here is my solar panel production it's about 3 pm in the afternoon and we are producing 5.6 kilowatts of solar power right now you can see here from this monitoring screen that we are pushing 3.2 kilowatts to power my home cover various things like air conditioning any lights or appliances running right now and then because we have an excess we're actually pushing 2.4 kilowatts to the grid generating a credit turning that meter backwards so this is the home screen
Daily Impact and Self-Powering
let's take a look at my impact here today we are 76 self-powered obviously we need to draw from the grid in the overnight hours that would be different however if we had powerwall we could actually be drawing from powerwall energy generated from previous days but we do have net metering here in maryland so actually when i'm drawing from the grid it's really a credit that we have already generated but we've generated 26.5 kilowatt hours of solar today and my house has used 14.7 that's our impact
Tesla App: Detailed Energy Flows
going back to the main screen here we can look at energy usage for the day and you can see the solar generation curve here starting around 7am when we started to produce energy weather panels and sort of a rough curve it's not a smooth curve if today was a perfectly sunny day it would look more uh smoother of an arc or more like a bell curve we did have some cloudiness earlier on broke out of the cloudiness and we are expecting some thunderstorms later on in the afternoon coming up so we'll probably end up uh having a sharp drop drop off when those storms move over but you can see here from the energy usage screen 26.5 kilowatt hours generated then you can also change things like what my home is used overlay with the solar power so you can see uh in the middle of the night around 4 am my air conditioning likely kicked down here and then a couple times in the morning although some of that was offset by solar you can even overlay grid power and you can see where you've pulled from the grid and where you're pushing from the grid anything negative is energy we are pushing to the grid you can scroll down and see all of those numbers listed down here my home is used 14.7 kilowatt hours we have generated 26.5 kilowatt hours so far today and we've pulled 3.5 from the grid but pushed 15.3 to the grid if you drop out any of the selections from the top then the numbers drop out as well and you can just change the over overlays and look at individual plots as well this would be what we've pulled from drawn from the grid all by itself and what my home is used all by itself as well so home used 14.7 and pulled 3.5 from the grid pushed 15.3 so pretty cool
Tesla App: Historical Performance Data
let's go ahead and take a look at uh we could look at impact i believe over the past week so for the week here um this is several weeks after i've turned my system on uh that i'm actually able to have time to produce this uh tour of the app but you can see here uh 41 self-powered for the week we have produced 125 kilowatt hours of solar and the home has used 171. uh not the best week here we did have thunderstorms for several days which has kind of knocked back our production
Previous Week's Strong Production
you go back to the previous week and you can see here uh last week was much better um we were actually on vacation for a couple days so we're not even home we were almost pushing all of our soil power back to the grid on those days we weren't at home
Monthly Performance Analysis
you can also look at impact over the month so here's the impact for the month of july again we turned our system on on the late on the second uh first full day was on july third here so 48 stop how it makes sense we're only have sunlight about half the day um but uh 758 kilowatt hours of solar produced and the helm is used on our home issues 615 kilowatt hours so that's about 150 kilowatt hours over that we've been been able to push back into the grid
Tesla App: Long-Term Trends and Analytics
there's other options here uh again once we have longer once we have solar for several months or even years you can look at solar over the year it's going to show the same numbers because we've only had here for the month and then you can look at lifetime generation so far so uh 758 kilowatt hours for the lifetime of my solar panels which began right around uh late on late on the day and july 2nd
Weekly Energy Usage Bar Graphs
you can also look at energy usage same plots over the week these are going to be more bar graphs here so for the week you can compare day to day what you've produced what your home has used and what you've drawn from and pushed back into the grid and you can see these numbers here so for the week 171 so far for this week our home issues 171 kilowatt hours uh we've produced 125 and drawn 100 from the grid and pushed 54 to the grid
Monthly Energy Usage Comparisons
so let's go back to the previous week we'll see some better numbers here so 147 the home he's used produced 277 lots of sunshine last week and pushed 192 kilowatt hours to the grid again we can look at month monthly energy usage uh the bar graph gets really tiny but you can kind of compare day to day here and again you can knock these different settings on and off so it's pretty cool i love the data in this app it's really cool you can actually see energy destinations so we have been able to use about 39 percent of the energy solar energy and pushed 60 to the grid so far for the month of july
Final Insights and Community Engagement
again you can look at it over the course of a year um this would be the different months that are showing up month six month seven and then lifetime energy usage as well so for 2020 we've only had our system for one year but we're already approaching one megawatt hour produced pretty pretty good for uh not even having our system for one month so i hope you enjoyed this tour of the tesla's tesla app uh looking at my solar panel uh production and you and where the energy is going again i love the data love the data this is one of the coolest parts about having the tesla solar panels is having access to all this data and it's a live feed you can open this app whenever you want and just take a look at what your solar panels are doing and uh and just track the numbers it's really cool
Call to Action and Referrals
all right guys thanks for watching my video if you really enjoyed it make sure you subscribe to our channel tesla family channel on youtube we really appreciate all of our subscribers and anyone who watches our videos thank you so much uh give us a like or a comment on this video that always helps too if you have any questions feel free to just throw them uh throw a comment down here and i'll get back to you when i get a minute otherwise check out all of our other videos on our channel as well make sure you try to view them all we've got some content on my tesla model 3 as well as other content on my tesla solar panels and the whole process of ordering them also follow us on twitter at tesla family chan use my referral code to buy a new tesla you will get 1 000 supercharging miles or if you order solar panels or solar roof through tesla you'll get a 100 reward after system activation so thanks everyone again and look forward to our next video we'll be talking about how i paid for my solar panels
Technical Specifications
| Feature | Detail |
|---|