I received this card in the mail… 50% off and free shipping if I order by 11/12:

So I found a template the family liked, took the time to upload and crop pictures… went to check out and this was the total:

I entered the promo codes and the next thing I know the subtotal is almost exactly twice what it was before they knew about the coupon:

Total bait-and-switch and fraudulent waste of my time. We went to Snapfish instead to order our Christmas cards.

Now, to be clear, we own a Model 3 and have never loved a car more than the Model 3. This has nothing to do with the Model 3 or Tesla Motors, Inc.

Our issue is with Tesla Energy Operations, Inc., a different subsidiary of Tesla, Inc.

On February 26, 2018 we entered into an agreement EN4123413 for a solar roof through tesla.com.

I marked it as a security deposit in Quicken so I didn’t lose track. My financial institution shows the $1000 transaction.

On April 17, 2021 I wrote EnergyOrdersNA@tesla.com because the website was showing a 0 kW roof with 1 “powerwall” but we had requested a 10.41 kW roof with 2 “powerwalls”. I never received a response. On a hunch that the email address was dead I also tried mysolarroof@tesla.com. Nothing.

I decided to call them on May 21, 2021. I spoke with someone in the Energy Customer Support who verified that this agreement existed and that a $1000 deposit was on file.

On December 15, 2021 we clocked 104 MPH winds at our house and found shingles all over the yard the next morning. We subsequently had an insurance adjuster out and old asphalt roof was totaled.

On February 4, 2022 I visited tesla.com and submitted a form requesting that the agreement be cancelled and the deposit be refunded since we needed a roof today and they are still not even servicing our area. The replacement roof is supposed to last 30 years… so our dream of owning a solar roof is dead.

I waited 2 weeks but never received the credit. I called Energy Customer Support on February 18, 2022. I was assured over the phone that the money would be returned.

After I hung up I started to worry that maybe the number for the debit card we used had changed. I mean, after all, almost 4 years had passed and a lot can change!

I called back a few hours later and was assigned a Case #28400040 for Tesla to investigate which account the refund was being sent to.

Didn’t hear anything for 4 days. On February 22, 2022 I reached out, again, and spoke with a Cheyenne P. She asked for proof of the security deposit being withdrawn from my account. I responded the same day with the requested documents from my bank (at my expense).

February 25, 2022 (three days later) Cheyenne P. acknowledged receipt from energycustomersupport@tesla.com and said it was being forwarded to their billing team.

By March 4, 2022 (almost 10 days later, and a month after I had initiated the refund process) I contacted Cheyenne P. once again. She informs me:

The billing team has reached out to me and stated that no refund is due, and let me explain why. The proof of payment you sent was for the $1000 refund that was already refunded back to you. The deposit refund that you are questioning was waived and never paid.

March 7, 2022 I had time to fight with Cheyenne P. again. Now she suggests that we were charged, but we were refunded the money on May 22, 2020 when the agreement was cancelled. I told her I had not cancelled it, and told her I verified in 2021 that it was still intact!

On a hunch I suspected maybe some wires had gotten crossed with our Model 3 purchase so I called Vehicle Support which Cheyenne P. so graciously provided the number for.

March 8, 2022 Mike in Vehicle Support was super helpful. He has access to the Energy Support records with no problem. He showed that there was still an active agreement with the right number still in the system (even though I had asked it to be cancelled) and that the $1000 charge was, in fact, attempted on the date in question but the system showed it was “failed” for some reason.

I informed Cheyenne P. of these findings and she responded:

Failed means that it was temporality held and then released as it was not withdrawn. The reason it was not withdrawn is because your deposit for this account was waived. We did not take the money from your account and that means that no refund is due. 

I don’t claim to understand temporality. Tesla is on the cutting edge with neuroscience, astrodynamics, you name it. But it is obvious that we were actually billed!

I authorized the bank to take a deeper look at the account history and verify all the charges to (and possible credits from) Tesla. They also provided the digital copy of the paper statement for the month in question.

At this point I am seeking legal recourse for the deposit (with interest), the time I have spent, fees researching the transactions at our bank, attorney fees, and court fees.

Tesla Energy Operations, Inc. is registered in the State of California as a Delaware corporation with a mailing address in Austin, TX. This makes the small claims process a little cumbersome from Overland Park, KS.

I have a request in with the Delaware Bar Association (Reference #14080) to find an attorney suitable to handle this matter. I am also tweeting this article to my pal Elon hoping maybe he can rattle some cages.

Infrastructure and endpoint monitoring is the latest addition to the suite of Unistellar services.

Late last year we were fat, dumb, and happy using a service called Monitis for our server and website monitoring. I think I learned about them originally through my previous employer and I spent about $250 annually for 5 servers and 2 endpoints.

Suddenly and inexplicably our account was locked. I was advised that Monitis was sold to TeamViewer and that I should proceed there to continue my service. I could not find anything that resembled what I liked about Monitis through TeamViewer … and I was a little jaded because of the abrupt transition … so I started researching alternatives.

• Uptrends
  • My favorite of the options, but only fit about 50% of my needs
  • Interface was pleasant and intuitive, but they had an awkward demarcation between their infrastructure and endpoint dashboards. It was also incredibly slow to find performance counters for server agents like they never heard of caching
  • Fred (the owner) was pleasant and available but when I brought up concerns I could tell he had no interest in improving what he already had or even getting feedback
  • The way they handle endpoint testing is kinda fishy – you can’t select specific cities like you could with Monitis… and Paris, Mumbai, and Kansas City all gave me about the same RTT to a box that was in Kansas City!
  • No way to embed infrastructure monitoring graphs on sites like NotifyPrice’s Status Page
  • Costs twice as much as Monitis did – and you have to get a quote for the infrastructure side of things by phone or email
  • Agent was lightweight and quick to install
• dotcom-monitor
  • A close second … interface was good and they actually figured out the caching bit for making performance counter configuration fast
  • Crazy expensive for 1 minute interval testing… everything they offer defaults to 4 hours which is absurdly unuseful
• Pingdom
  • You have probably heard about SolarWinds in the news … this is their product for website monitoring
  • If the above doesn’t make you cringe, the site reported 25 minutes of downtime before the first successful check
  • Not only do you not know what cities you are getting tested from, but you also only get to pick test locations on a continent level
• CloudRadar
  • A tie for second in my mind … they basically give you a limited list of Azure locations … and you can only pick one which has inherent propensity for false alarms
  • Their server agent was a little heavier at just over 11 MB
• Datadog
  • Probably overkill if all you need is infrastructure and endpoint monitoring
  • Most expensive option on the list (only work with Enterprise level clients)
  • Server agent was huge and took forever to install … I think that is as far as I got before moving on
• Uptime
  • I cannot say with any certainty that they do anything beyond endpoint monitoring

So at the end of the day (looking at maybe $500 a year) I decided to write my own Windows Server agent. And with that success I launched an ingest API. And the natural progression was to add a UI around it on the web. After I got users, notifications, roles, some reporting, and maintenance windows fleshed out it was just a couple days to do the invoicing and payment methods. Overmonitor was born!

• Cloud-based
• Small and lightweight agent
• Fast configuration interface
• Completely customizable pricing
• Maintenance windows that work
• Geotargetting at the city level
• All graphs embeddable
• Push notifications for any alert
• Process monitors with rollup
  • The use case here was NotifyPrice offline scrapers… 32 of them run all with the same process name and different command line arguments

• Trend analysis and capacity planning
  • After I put the configurable low and high alert thresholds, it occured to me I could do a daily trend analysis using linear regression on the samples we had collected for a given metric
  • The above coupled with a planning horizon will alert users about the possibility of running out of processing power, memory, or disk space in the months ahead
• Network configuration alerts
  • Seemed like a “no brainer” but I don’t remember any of these vendors telling me when subnets or external IP address changed or are mixed (subnet) or duplicated (external IP)
• Distributed monitors
  • Allows users with agents installed on servers to configure their participation in our growing network of test locations

Early Access Game

Get instant access and start playing; get involved with this game as it develops.

Note: This Early Access game is not complete and may or may not change further. If you are not excited to play this game in its current state, then you should wait to see if the game progresses further in development. Learn more