What Can Powerwall Back Up
Powerwall is now designed for whole home backup. With whole home backup, your Powerwall system can support your entire home with backup power during an outage. This includes 120V loads such as lights, plugs and small appliances as well as 240V heavy loads such as air conditioners, electric cooking ranges, well pumps, EV charging, electric dryers, electric water heaters and pool pumps.
How much your Powerwall system can back up and for how long is dependent on multiple factors such as the number of Powerwalls and appliances you have and your home’s energy usage. The following restrictions are provided as general guidelines and are not guarantees specific to any individual home.
Check Large Appliance Compatibility with Powerwall
Refer to the information below to determine if your appliances are compatible with the number of Powerwalls you have selected. If you choose to proceed with incompatible appliances, your system will be installed for whole home backup, but your Powerwall may be unable to provide backup power until you turn the appliances off during an outage. To avoid this, you can add additional Powerwalls or upgrade your appliance to more energy efficient versions.
Other typical large appliances, such as air handlers and electric ovens, are expected to be backed up in a normal Powerwall system.
Electric Heating and Cooling (Water and Air)
For compressor-based equipment, check both the Locked Rotor Amp rating (LRA) and the Running Load Amp rating (RLA), which can be found on the nameplate of your equipment. If the LRA is blank, labeled with ‘N/A’ or is equal to or less than the Running Load Amps (RLA), your equipment is variable speed. This means the LRA should be compatible with a single Powerwall.
Resistive-based Equipment
Resistive-based equipment includes tank water heaters, electric tankless water heaters, etc.
Compressor-based Equipment
Compressor-based equipment includes air conditioners, heat pumps, etc.
These recommendations assume only one heating or cooling device is operational at a time. If multiple devices will be running at the same time, add their power consumption together. For compressor-based equipment, it is unlikely two units will start at the exact same time. Based on this assumption, the LRA of the larger unit can be added to the RLA of the concurrent unit. For larger units, contact your Project Advisor.
Compatible Well Pumps
Electric Vehicle Charging
Learn more about how Powerwall coordinates with Tesla vehicles for enhanced vehicle charging during power outages, enabling Tesla charging compatibility with a single Powerwall.
Services Greater than 200 A
A service that is greater than 200 A can be backed up using one of two methods. If possible, our installation crews will perform a partial home backup, splitting the home’s electrical service into two distinct systems and backing up just one of them. For whole home backup, we will split the service into two systems and install a Backup Gateway and Powerwall(s) for each system (see diagram below, depicting a 400 A service split into two 200 A systems). If the service cannot be split into two systems, then one Backup Gateway will be used to back up as much of your home’s service as possible, up to a 200 A limit, and considering site-specific installation complexities.
