Solar recordHoursDaysOne dayBalanceWeatherSkyOutagesEfficiencyCar

When the grid failed

Thirteen months of grid status from the battery gateway, which records the moment the house stops drawing from the utility and starts running on its own. Fourteen such moments, none longer than nine minutes.

The headline number is not the one you would expect. The house spent 77 minutes disconnected from the grid — but most of that is a delay the inverter is required to observe before reconnecting, not the utility being absent. Take it out and the grid itself was down for about 12 minutes.

utility out reconnect hold, computed

Thirteen months, fourteen interruptions

Each mark is one time the house went to battery. Height is how long it stayed there. The pale part of every mark is the five minutes the inverter is required to wait once the grid is back, so only the solid part is the utility actually being out — and on seven of these there is no solid part at all.

Nothing is shorter than five minutes

IEEE 1547 clause 4.10 sets an Enter Service delay: the inverter watches five minutes of healthy grid before it reconnects. New York's Department of Public Service publishes 300 s as the required default. The floor is visible without being told — and the single intentional disconnection, the one event no anti-islanding rule governs, is the only one below it.

When they happen

Hour of the day across, month down. They cluster: three inside two hours on one July afternoon, three more across one August night. Fourteen independent faults would not group like that.

What the weather was doing

Every hour on record as a pale dot, and the hours containing an outage marked. Hover for each one's rank — not against all hours, which would only tell you that July afternoons are warm, but against hours from the same fortnight of the year and the same time of day.

The three failures within one hour on 2 July occurred at 93, 89 and 89°F with negligible wind, consistent with demand-driven failure rather than storm damage.

The pair either side of midnight on 13 August rank in the 95th and 97th percentile for that hour of night, but were 78°F. A percentile indicates that an hour was unusual for the season, not that conditions were extreme; the dashed lines mark absolute thresholds for comparison.

The one clearly meteorological event is 4 April: a 10 mph gust, windier than 98% of comparable hours, at a mild 57°F. The station is in the garden, so this is the weather at the house rather than at an airport.

grid solar battery house

Each one, close up

Twenty minutes either side. Grid power drops to exactly zero and then stops being written at all, because Home Assistant records on change and a steady value produces no rows. The gap in the line is the outage. The battery supplies the house throughout.