Franklin Home Power Solution
FranklinWH system brings you energy freedom, so when the power goes out, your life at home is virtually unaffected. During a power outage, the system is designed to supply its stored energy to power your home. Outages are unpredictable in length and can last for hours or even days at a time. Understanding how the FranklinWH provides backup power and becoming familiar with best practices can help extend the duration of system backup during an outage.
How FranklinWH Provides Backup Power
When a power outage occurs or the utility grid quality falls below regulatory standards, Your FranklinWH system will immediately disconnect from the utility grid and take over the home backup load in less than a second, which means that the system will power your home loads almost unnoticed. The backup circuit provides the required power. The FranklinWH App will notify you when mains / utility power is unavailable for five minutes so that you may begin to keep an eye on your energy usage. When utility power is restored, a second notification is sent. To ensure you receive this alert, go to Settings in the FranklinWH App and select Notifications. You can set your preferences for receiving all notifications, including power outage notifications. Make sure your device settings allow notifications from the FranklinWH App.
Manage Your Power Usage During an Outage
During a power outage, you can back up any number of home loads as long as their combined wattage does not exceed the total wattage rating of the FranklinWH system. The best way to extend the backup time of the system is to reduce or postpone the use of high-power appliances such as air conditioners, car chargers, electric water heaters and dishwashers.
Preparing for a Power Outage
When you receive an outage notice from your utility provider or a weather notice that could result in an outage, you’ll probably want to consider the uncertainty of the outage's length, which may last days rather than hours, and that the solar energy production is likely to be lower during an outage. Before a power outage occurs, consider switching to Emergency Backup mode in the FranklinWH App. In the event of an extreme weather notification from the National Weather Service, Storm Hedge mode automatically switches the FranklinWH system to Emergency Backup to prepare for possible grid outages that may occur during extreme weather events. Certain weather conditions can cause reduced solar energy production, such as snow deposited on solar panels. Consider inspecting panels daily during adverse weather conditions and safely removing obstructions.
System Overload
Starting high power loads during a power outage may overload the FranklinWH system and cause it to stop delivering power to your home. If this happens, please turn off the large loads. The FranklinWH system will try to restart within one minute after overloading. If the overload continues 20 times, the system will enter a self-locking state and you will need to manually restart the system to resume power to your home.
Not Enough Stored Power
During a power outage, the reserve power of the FranklinWH system will gradually decrease with load usage. If the power drops to 5%, the system will push a low battery notification to your FranklinWH App while continuing to provide backup power. The load is powered until the power is exhausted and the system enters sleep mode.
Black Start
When your FranklinWH system is in sleep mode, due to low power, it will automatically wake up at 10:00am, 12:00pm, and 2:00pm to try to use solar energy to charge the system. Conditions involving excessive loads, or solar production exceeding the system tolerance during the wake-up period, will prevent charging the batteries. These conditions may result in the system entering sleep state again. To improve the wake-up success rate, please turn off all loads before the system initiates Black Start. You can also manually restart the system after reducing the loads, and wake up the system for a black start when sunlight is sufficient, to begin charging the FranklinWH system.
Generator Connection to the FranklinWH System
If your home has a voltage sensing, dry contact, or ATS type generator, the FranklinWH system will automatically start the generator during an outage when the battery state of charge (SOC) drops to the preset generator starting threshold. When the battery SOC reaches its preset generator upper threshold, the generator will automatically stop and your household loads will be powered by the batteries, allowing you to save fuel avoid unnecessary generator run time.
How to Restart a FranklinWH System
If your FranklinWH system stops providing power to your home, it may be in Standby mode after running low on power or being repeatedly overloaded. If your system is connected to the internet, you will receive push notifications when the FranklinWH system goes to sleep or experiences an overload.
Resetting Your System
If a manual restart fails to bring the FranklinWH system back online, you can use the system control switch, the red switch on the aGate EMS, to restart both the aGate and aPower to reset the entire system. Turn off the aGate and aPower for at least 2 minutes, then turn on all units to reset and power cycle the system.
Local Monitoring
If your internet and cellular networks go down, you can monitor the FranklinWH system through the aGate local hotspot or Bluetooth, by connecting the FranklinWH App through the System Direct Connect setting.
