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Inverter cycling during outage

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Gwgan

Almost a wagon
Aug 11, 2013
3,476
2,925
Maine
In an outage. PW is near full and loads are tiny. Solaredge inverters are off and Gateway is doing what is expected except the inverters keep cycling on and off. Shouldn’t they stay off until the PW is drawn down some? Is there a threshold setting for this somewhere?
 

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In an outage. PW is near full and loads are tiny. Solaredge inverters are off and Gateway is doing what is expected except the inverters keep cycling on and off. Shouldn’t they stay off until the PW is drawn down some? Is there a threshold setting for this somewhere?
Start charging your EV to increase the load, which will drop the SOE % and solar production will stay on. Need to be below about 95% with sufficient load to keep the inverters on. Otherwise, this is normal behavior.
 
With my system, with Tesla gateway and inverters: in a grid outage, once my powerwalls reach 100% and house load is minimal, the inverters shut off until about 90% battery capacity, then the inverters turn back on. I wonder if the powerwall to solaredge inverters integration is not as granular so it does micro-shutdowns instead of larger %, and wonder if that is adjustable. (Just thinking out loud).
 
Exactly that.
SolarEdge inverters follow the curtailment spec with a hard cut-off - once the frequency goes up past a small threshold, they turn off completely.
Micro Inverters have a more linear curtailment, the higher the frequency offset from nominal, the more the curtailment.

The adjustment is not available in the inverter.
There is an adjustment in the gateway for the maximum frequency shift.
Default is 65Hz, which guarantees all inverters curtail completely, but it also fools most UPSes into running off battery instead of passing through.
Some people ask to have the off-grid frequency reduced to 63Hz because of this, which is still enough to curtail the inverters, but lets small UPSes pass through.
If the gateway raises frequency and still sees power coming in from the inverters when it cannot absorb it into the batteries, it will shut the whole system down.
 
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I did exactly that, requested Tesla to adjust the off-grid frequency. It was amazingly easy, only took Tesla about a week after I requested. They did not say what they changed the frequency to, and I haven't had a good time to push into off-grid to check (actually hadn't thought about it until now). Now I have some testing to do this coming weekend :). I can easily determine frequency with Powerwall Dashboard as that is part of the data it tracks.

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I'll post an after-screenshot once I test.
 
I did exactly that, requested Tesla to adjust the off-grid frequency. It was amazingly easy, only took Tesla about a week after I requested. They did not say what they changed the frequency to, and I haven't had a good time to push into off-grid to check (actually hadn't thought about it until now). Now I have some testing to do this coming weekend :). I can easily determine frequency with Powerwall Dashboard as that is part of the data it tracks.

View attachment 975508
I'll post an after-screenshot once I test.


One of the "biggest wins" that this subforum has accomplished (in my opinion anyway) is that this specific issue (frequency shift and UPSs) was discussed here, troubleshot etc, and is likely the reason for the process of getting it changed by Tesla being "easy" now.

This 35 page thread discussed the issue, and the early pioneers here had a heck of a time trying to get this escalated through Tesla. Their efforts, however, made it so that this is now a routine ask, with a known escalation point, within Tesla.