All,
I want to share a success with the Community, which may lead others to appreciate the benefits of Local Control.
Yesterday, here in Northern Virginia, we had a rather fierce Thunderstorm. Not unusual in itself, but typically, my Provider NOVEC (Northern Virginia Electrical Cooperative) does a fairly good job of managing trees near power lines, and all things considered, power outages are rare. Even more rare (despite my provider being COMCAST) does my Internet connection go down.
Last night proved exceptional in both ways.
A tree fell "just so", and took out power to 173 homes, and Internet down for (presumably) a similar number. My home was one of the 173.
Since it was a mere 173 homes in a service area of 85K Homes, the restoration time was a mere ~ 2 hours.
So really, nothing to write home about. However, this outage allowed both my Tesla Battery system and Hubitat to prove themselves!
The Tesla picked up the load so smoothly, I only saw a brief flicker on the lights and didn't think much of it until my neighbor texted me to say I was the only one on the street with power!
Once I realized (and the Tesla alerted me very shortly after I switched my phone from the now Internetless WiFi to the 4G signal), I started my invented on the spot load shedding. I walked to the Nest Thermostats and turned them to "off", and then grabbed my tablet and started switching non-critical loads off.
The Hubitat performed with nary a glitch. All the lighting rules worked, the house continued to run without a problem. Once I switched the HVAC systems off, we turned off ceiling fans in unused rooms, and I switched all the exterior lights off. With just the pumps, fridge, freezer, dehumidifier, and Network up and running plus some LED lighting in the living room, and whatever vampiric load I have, I was pulling 900 Watts, so clearly I need to do some work.
But the key takeaway here, is that despite not having internet, my automations continued to work. My house ran perfectly, and once the power was restored, I was able to quickly resume normal operations.
In the future, intend to use a button to enable a "load shed" and perhaps implement a power outage protocol that lets me run my Freezer for a set period every couple of hours, and set the dehumidifier to a much higher moisture level. Once I replace the Nest units with something else, I should actually be able to monitor the Tesla system and Load Shed automatically when I got to Battery power.
In closing, I'd like to say "Thank You" to the Hubitat team. The Hubitat Elevation Hub performed admirably in a "perfect storm" set of conditions, and I couldn't be more happy to have moved here from "those other guys".
Scott
This is tornado season and we just had local tornado warning. My tree may arrive soon enough.
