When we purchased our new house 5 years ago, we had a Tesla PowerWall installed. It came with a Telstra 3G SIM card and when they installed it, I told them to connect it via Ethernet. The technician refused, saying that it has 3G and doesn’t need to be connect to the home network at all.
I received a text from Tesla this morning, telling me that our PowerWall will not be covered by warranty when Telstra kill 3G at the end of next month.
I then received an email from Tesla (that looked like Spam).
I then receive a phone call from Tesla.
I mentioned that I don’t have WiFi coverage in my garage and they told me to move my router. I told them that I instructed the technician to connect via Ethernet originally and they said that I would need to get the technician back out to connect it.
I am not allowed to plug Ethernet into it without voiding warranty and I need to plug Ethernet into it to prevent the warranty from being void.
I visited my wife’s old workplace.
They got new EFTPOS terminals some time in the last 6 months… running on 3G.
It is insane that the installing sparky ran three-phase power to the location but doesn’t bother running some twisted pair for Ethernet at the same time.
We had to fight with the installer to have our Solar Inverter connected to Ethernet, even though there was a cable already in place. Unfortunately we won the fight for the Inverter but lost the fight for the PowerWall.
I know that at least one Manufacturer who is deprioritising warranty claims on “smart” Car Charger wallboxes unless they were connected by Ethernet at the time of installation.
@Salvo Oof. In the next couple of years I’ll be getting solar and some kind of home battery. I’ve been vaguely considering Tesla on the idea that they couldn’t possibly mess up a stationary battery in my home like they do their cars. Thanks for setting me straight.
Don’t get me wrong, the PowerWall has been great for the last 4 years, It is just that the subcontracting technicians didn’t want to do any more work than the bare minimum, even though it was negligible extra effort.
That said, since Musk has severely gone off the rails and still has controlling interest in the Company, I would be hesitant to trust anything that comes out from the North American operations.
The problem is that all the other aftermarket battery backup technologies (that I know about from 3 year old research) are either inferior to the PowerWall in every way, or need to be manufactured bespoke for the Australian market.
@Salvo @Seagoon_ i have no plans on ever buying anything Tesla, but if I ever had any potential to, its bullshit like this which smacks me out of it (drunken stupor likely)
The PowerWall is a great product for what it is, but Lithium Ion is wasted in a permanent install. Other battery technologies are more reliable, cheaper, safer and simpler.
The only thing Lithium Ion has going is ubiquity due to volumes of scale. It is like putting a ESP32 in something that needs to be connected to the internet because it is cheaper than a separate microcontroller chip and ethernet chip; or how most Lightning headphones use Bluetooth because a single Bluetooth chip with integrated DAC is cheaper and more readily available than an official (or even a bootleg) Lightning chip and a DAC chip.
