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How is solar energy prioritized in your system?

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Hi all.

For the last two months, the way my system has been operating is that the sun comes up, it fulfils the needs of the energy load of the house, and when the solar energy exceeds that load it begins to charge my powerwall.

Starting this morning, as soon as the sun came up, the battery stopped discharging, the solar panel started charging the battery fully, and any load for the house was supported by energy from the grid. This meant that there was a draw from the grid of 3.6 kW while it recharged my battery fully, and it is only now using energy from the sun to power my house.

I've been on the phone with tesla for almost two hours and they keep telling me that's how it's supposed to work and that the way I'm describing it working previously is "my perception" but not how it's designed to work. Am I wrong? Has it been operating in a non-standard (but significantly better) mode for the last two months and just started following the rules now?

I've never been so frustrated. "That is your perception" should never be part of a customer service's script.

Thanks,

Eliza
 
How it operates depends on what mode you are in, and what your reserve is in relation to your current stored energy. What you described for your desired operation is how it operates in self powered mode, when you have more energy stored in the battery than the reserve that you set.

What you are describing as far as it operating now, is how it might work in time based control, and / or when the powerwalls are below the reserve that is set.

Go see if you swapped the modes from self powered to time based control. If its in time based control (as I suspect), customer service is right, and "thats how its supposed to work (in that mode)". If you dont want that and you are in time based control, switch back to self powered.

Perhaps you got into time based control mode on accident, or you setup your energy plan in the app and it auto switched to it or something.

If you are not in time based control, and are in self powered, if you changed your reserve to be higher than the amount of stored energy, the system will attempt to fill the batteries to your reserve first with PV, before running your house.

Note also that I changed your thread title slightly, to ensure that the slant of this thread was an attempt to help you (thus could remain a separate thread) rather than a customer service rant (which I would have merged into the customer service feedback thread).
 
I'm on time based control and it recharges the Powerwalls while running the the house from grid in the mornings. I wish I could remain on time based control and have it prioritize my home with the excess going to the Powerwalls but I never figured out a way unless I switched modes. Supposedly you can use some home management apps to do this.
 
The behavior is what happens with the Connected Solutions program. When an event is planned, the battery gets all solar production until it's charged. During this time, the entire house load comes from the grid.

If the OP is a part of any sort of "connected solutions" program (which I believe is available in their area) and they actually signed up for that, then they should not be surprised by the system / batteries doing "something", as those programs specifically let "someone else" control your system.

IF they are a part of that, then they should not be surprised, and also should not be calling tesla to talk about system operation in this case, etc.
 
Did your gateway get the new firmware update in the last couple of days? I'm guessing that it lost all memory of normal usage, so it needs a week to learn again.
Also check that the peak times / costs haven't got reset.
What you describe is what it does if it doesn't know / doesn't think there will be enough solar to charge you before peak.