The Powerwall fix I can't explain

Our brand-new three-battery system worked for exactly two hours, then went silent for a week. If you've been following along: we added a Powerwall 3 and Expansion to our 2023 Powerwall 2, the beta compatibility firmware brought all three alive for one glorious couple of hours, then the whole lot sat down and refused to move a single watt.

For that week the house ran fine on solar and grid, but the batteries just hung there, state of charge frozen. I could bully them by hand — force a charge with max-backup, force a discharge through the Amber app — but it was brute force, far too fiddly to live on. I knew this was a beta install, so the teething trouble didn't worry me; the quiet did. An update only ever came if I went chasing it, from both Sapphire and Tesla. Nobody oversold the tech — everyone was upfront it was bleeding-edge, the general rollout not due until June — but a site sitting dead for days could have used the odd status update.

The fix, when it came, was fast and baffling. On Thursday 14 May Jacob came back, late afternoon and into the evening. We were out for pizza at Brunetti's on Lygon Street; I checked the garage camera to see if he'd finished, so I could shut the door remotely — probably the most 2026 sentence I'll write all year. He'd brought a replacement Gateway, so I assumed that was it — except afterwards the unit on the wall looks like my original one. A firmware change from Tesla's end? Wiring? Some combination? They're still monitoring and haven't said, and I can't tell you what fixed it. Whatever it was, by the time he left the app showed flow again — the numbers moving for the first time in a week.

It's kept working since. The automation is back, all three — Powerwall 2, Powerwall 3, PW3 Expansion — pulling together: 40.5 kWh of storage and 15 kW of sustained output, enough to run the air con, heat pump and EV charger right through a grid outage. It's still strange to glance at the app, see 50% charge, and remember that across three batteries that's 150% of the single Powerwall we were living on a few weeks ago.

Sapphire were honest about what this was and came back after hours to make it right. Early adopter tax, paid in full; receipt unclear. To the Powerwall 2 owners who've messaged me about doing the same upgrade — yes, but pick an installer you can trust to see it through.

Anyone else been an unwitting beta site for new home-battery gear?