Replies: 2 comments 9 replies
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I found a different hit using Bing (which brought me back here :) ) but strangely this other post reinforces that my battery should have been charging (I'd set it to TOU and 100% reserved, and it was super-off-peak). Putting two and two together, I guess that this setting means it is overriding the behaviour to charge only from solar? (i.e. enable grid-charge)? |
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Agree, the "override" part seems to suggest that. There are several Powerwall related settings that may be related:
Is this set on your system?
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Hi Jason, unfortunately that setting seems to be disabled for me (and always has been since install even though I've charged from the grid during that time). Teslemetry and/or NetZero report that my system is set to allow grid charging though: |
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Your settings seem a bit perplexing to me - 100% backup reserve? SWAG here, but maybe that seemingly prevents any discharge, which then means you can't charge anything anyway? I can't quite put it into the right words, but that just strikes me as a bit... "interesting"? The other thing I might suggest is this: is this a new installation? If so, you might still be waiting on your PTO from the utility? My system just went through the battery calibration charade over the past couple of days. During that period, they set ChargeOnlyOnSolarOverride here and there to apparently prevent the system from mucking with their testing. I can see that's not what happened for you today, but it is something they seem to turn off and on under different conditions. |
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Hi John, under ordinary circumstances I'd agree with you. My backup reserve is normally set to 20%. The problem in this case was that after 5 straight days of rain the battery was at reserve (and had then further drained to ~15%) and I wanted to charge from grid. Setting the mode to time of use and 100% reserve is meant to tell the battery that I'm not at reserve and need to charge during super-off-peak. That's exactly what I did last time and worked perfectly (the graph from the earlier time doesn't show reserve but around 4pm you can see it went from minimal solar charging to using the grid... technically this was more of a test so I had to configure my plan to say 4pm was super off-peak 😁 ) Oh, and not a new installation, although I added a second battery about a month ago now. |
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I'd read in multiple places (including, I think, here in some discussion) that playing with the self-powered/TOU setting or moving around the slider caused the system to want to retrain itself for a while, so you wouldn't see immediate expected behavior changes. That had been my experience as well. Because how the software works, it (maybe inadvertently) trains you how to behave in response, I've taken to just creating my own storm watch during off peak times to juice the batteries up where I want them when I feel it's going to come up short. That approach doesn't seem to count against me behaviorally, doesn't seem to mess with the training, and gets me to where I want to be sometimes. We all react to their quirks with quirks of our own. It drives me nuts that setting the car to "Charge on Excess Solar" will prefer charging the car to charging the house batteries. To me, that's backward - I don't have any excess solar until the three PWs are charged. I end up arm wrestling this bit as well by stopping a car charge when it commences too early, and then requesting it charge when the house is full. I work from home. Were that not the case, some of this would just be too much burden to bear. |
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Interesting. That may be exactly what happened, but then I don't understand any other way to get it to do what we want. (Although I made the changes manually, I was essentially trying to do something like this https://scotthelme.co.uk/hacking-my-tesla-powerwalls-to-be-the-ultimate-home-energy-solution/ so that my battery would charge during super-off-peak, but normally I don't want that since I'm self-powered ~99% of the time) How do you create your own storm watch without it messing with things? (in some respects that's basically what I was trying to do) |
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I just go into the settings for Storm Watch, "schedule" an event (which always starts now, so I'm not sure about the word schedule in the description) , and give it a duration. I imagine the system considers any storm event to be an out-of-the-ordinary occurrence, so it doesn't muck with the statistics it has gathered, and doesn't confound the logic engine being applied. To possibly further support your observations, I found that when I was playing with the slider some to get what I wanted, it would start doing odd things that made no sense, such as getting to midnight when off peak started, having sufficient battery to reach morning, but electing to run off the grid anyway. I scratched my head over that for a while, then it started doing the right thing, but in between had picked up an even more curious behavior of running off battery until around 4am, then even thought I had 35% or so left (TOU set to 20%), it would then start running off the grid for a few hours. It employs some rather curious logic at times. Because I have too much time on my hands in between projects, I rigged up some calcs that figure out if I'm going to make it to midnight, going to make it to the morning (the Kris Kristofferson problem: help me make it through the night), and start pushing notifications around noon. It gives me enough time to throw a one or two hour storm watch event in, if need be, and make up the ground, doing what I can to make it until around 9am the next morning without drawing unexpectedly from the grid, or burning through peak time grid energy. |
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Holy crap. I don't know if that's always been there and I've forgotten or if it's new... but I had no idea that was there. I thought storm watch was either on or off. That would probably have been a much more appropriate option... I've had 5 days of bad weather and the battery is flat, tell it there's a storm coming and I need to charge and voila (hopefully). I'll do some more testing, and will definitely test this setting first. I also subscribed to Teslemetry so I can try using Home Assistant to update the powerwall via the VPP API's (which might behave differently to moving the slider as an "end-user". Thanks so much! Going back to the original point of the post (where I said I wouldn't get sidetracked on the non-charging issue... and then got sidetracked 😁 )...
After I set my mode back to self-consumption and dropped the reserve back to 20%, my ChargeFromSolarOnlyOverride has turned off... so I guess I'm no longer enabled for grid-charge but I don't know whether that's because I'm above my reserve or because I went to self-consumption. (I also have no idea why my system reports that grid charging is restricted... it's said that since install and my installer claims it's nothing to do with them which seems somewhat likely when it's successfully charged from the grid even while showing it's restricted 🤷♂️). |
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An observation on your distraction, followed by an observation on your... observation? My systems upgraded to 25.10.4 a couple nights ago. It took a bit to notice any possible effects, as I was right smack dab in the middle of a Battery Calibration (wish they'd think this thing out more), but I have two observations that I've formed from it. The first is that this firmware even further improves the "flapping" the system does between providing/over-providing for the house demand and under-providing and drawing from the grid. I used to see it jumping back and forth by 500w or more, and in a 25.2.X upgrade they lessened it to largely under 100w. The last couple of days it's been a mere murmer. The second item, though, I noticed pretty quickly as a result of the calibration, and it's continued: even though I'm set for 80% TOU / 20% reserve, it seems to want to hedge its bets and flips over to drawing from the grid at 24%, and if battery capacity slowly creeps lower I have now twice noticed the system putting ChargeFromSolarOnlyOverride in place, the system charge from the grid to get to 24%, and then immediately pull that alert back and revert to normal operation. Battery calibration takes the system to its near nadir, so when this happened then it was a sizeable draw to get from around 2kWh to 9.6kWh, but this morning it had only wandered down around .2 kWh and felt it needed to top the system off. As for your grid charging restricted, I'd mentioned this somewhere on another thread, but when my system reached final approval, my PTO from PG&E came extremely quickly - less than 24 hours. Permission to charge from grid was flipped on, but it still had this odd behavior. After a few days of this, I sent in a ticket to customer support and pointed out what it was doing. I ended up on the phone with somebody, and they then said there was a second configuration only they could do, and that it hadn't yet been completed after several days of them being notified PTO had been granted. They flipped the thing over, and within ten minutes or so the system was behaving differently. What the setting was I don't know, but when I talked with them they recognized the scenario. If you feel the system is behaving oddly and counter to your expectations, I'd suggest opening up a support request and ask for clarification. It could be you're only partially configured correctly. |
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Thanks John, I had the system installed roughly 10 months ago (although only recently added the second battery) so it shouldn't be a delay, but I don't know anyone else in my Ausgrid area (Sydney/Australia) to know if I should be seeing the grid charging settings Jason shared. My installer certainly seemed to think everything was correct at the original install. I've been rather busy this week but will test the scheduled event setting as well as the Teslemetry API to see if I can determine a solution before I try raising any tickets with my provider :) |
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I've been looking into the powerwall alerts after a confusing 24 hours where everything told me I should have been charging from the grid... but wasn't. I won't sidetrack that discussion here, but in investigating it I've found an alert called ChargeOnlyFromSolarOverride.
This alert is active on my system and I think is why it wasn't charging (although I'm not certain because it did finally start charging from the grid while this alert was still active). For some reason I can't find out much about the setting though... that string appears in only a single Google search result. Does anyone know what that alert means and how you can control it?
A related alert SolarChargeOnlyLimited supposedly means “The system has been configured to only charge from solar. Solar is not available, therefore the charge request cannot be met.”, however I've had that alert showing at times when I am successfully charging from solar.
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