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Lost power for 5mins today (just now) - PowerWall2 keeps us up....

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Providing we don’t turn on AC or charge the cars, running 24/7 purely off solar is do-able for as, as long as we get a few hours of sunshine each day. But this winter has been a killer for my “net” cumulative solar v grid position, I’m way negative compared to last year, a lot more AC use. Working from home has been a much bigger factor than I thought it would be.
One thing I’m starting to notice is that although solar might vary considerably this year from previous years for the same month, the cumulative total of year to date hardly alters, and by the end of the year the total is minimally different to previous years.
 
Can you charge the power wall on an off-peak circuit? My house has so much tree shade it will be a battle to get solar, but I really want a financial excuse to get a power wall.
Yes you can. We run this way with a super off-peak overnight rate when we charge the car and the powerwall automatically tops itself up (mostly completely, sometimes less based on its learning algorithms). Coupled with solar (only 5kW and non-optimal) the majority of our grid consumption is this time-shifted off-peak power from the powerwall.
 
Yes you can. We run this way with a super off-peak overnight rate when we charge the car and the powerwall automatically tops itself up (mostly completely, sometimes less based on its learning algorithms). Coupled with solar (only 5kW and non-optimal) the majority of our grid consumption is this time-shifted off-peak power from the powerwall.

I presume this is a TOU tariff rather than a separate off-peak meter/service?
 
One thing I’m starting to notice is that although solar might vary considerably this year from previous years for the same month, the cumulative total of year to date hardly alters, and by the end of the year the total is minimally different to previous years.

Not for me in Sydney.
The smoke and rainy/cloudy days puts me way behind compared the drought of 2018/2019. June and August 2020 have been the only months that has come close/exceeded previous years so far.

upload_2020-9-1_10-51-5.png
 
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Not for me in Sydney.
The smoke and rainy/cloudy days puts me way behind compared the drought of 2018/2019. June and August 2020 have been the only months that has come close/exceeded previous years so far.

View attachment 583011
Do you have the total for each year not broken into months. Keen to see if your percentage difference year on year is much different to Adelaide
 
It's a bit complicated to give YTD figures. My system was installed 18-Jan-2018, so 2018 is missing 17.5 days.
I just did some quick spreadsheet work....

upload_2020-9-1_16-37-14.png


Using YTD from 18-Jan (to 31-Aug) figures, I am down 13% of the 2018 production and 8.5% on 2019 production.
I'm not surprised it is down this much with all the smoke in the air and dust/smoke on the panels for Jan and Feb, and then lots of cloudy/rainy days since.
 
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It's a bit complicated to give YTD figures. My system was installed 18-Jan-2018, so 2018 is missing 17.5 days.
I just did some quick spreadsheet work....

View attachment 583131

Using YTD from 18-Jan (to 31-Aug) figures, I am down 13% of the 2018 production and 8.5% on 2019 production.
I'm not surprised it is down this much with all the smoke in the air and dust/smoke on the panels for Jan and Feb, and then lots of cloudy/rainy days since.
The average per day is the relevant number as it allows for your shorter first year. The current year average per day will start to increase now as spring & summer hit, and I note that in your first two years your average per day was consistant over the length of a full (or almost full) year. Will be interesting to see at the end of this year if the bushfires actually impacted your annual solar production. My original point was that (in Adelaide) although month vs month varies, year vs year doesn’t (comparing full years or adjusted part years)
 
So keeping on this Powerwall thread, does anyone know of any API endpoints or similar to make the powerwall push power to the grid? I assume there is one as the virtual power plant energy retailers use it (eg AGL) to pull power on demand.

I'm looking at moving to Amber Electric who sell power in Vic at wholesale rates and they will have Victorian powerwall integration near the end of Q2 2021 but until then i'd like to automate some power usage. Admittedly changing jobs in the next month so probably won't have any time to get this to work.. but.. in theory, basically sell/push to the grid during high $$ peaks (usually late afternoons/nights) and charge when it's negative (usually middle of the day when there is too much solar), so yeah, get paid to charge the powerwall/car.
Outside of that just use it like normal, charge the battery and use it at night.
 
So keeping on this Powerwall thread, does anyone know of any API endpoints or similar to make the powerwall push power to the grid? I assume there is one as the virtual power plant energy retailers use it (eg AGL) to pull power on demand.
There are some unauthorised Powerwall API webpages out there (which are probably incomplete) with warnings that you can seriously screw up your PW2 if you don’t know what you are doing.

I had a bit of a play with some of the reporting functions (read-only) but didn’t dare try anything that involved writing data to the PW2. On the API page I looked at, I don’t recall seeing anything that would tell the PW2 to discharge to the grid, but that capability is definitely present.

I’m not sure why anyone would want to deliberately get PW2 to discharge to the grid unless their utility was doing it at their instigation and hence paying you for it. Because in most cases, the money you get per kWh for grid export is less than what you pay per kWh from the grid (except for offpeak rates in some plans), so you are better off keeping all of your solar in your PW2.
 
Time of Use power plans.. and also if you're using wholesale power prices which change every 30mins, especially in summer peak you can get paid pretty well for pushing to the grid in evenings. For short windows of time it's $ dollars per kw instead of cents.

Yeah i've looked at the API's to give you energy status, etc and I see you can do a call to recharge from the grid to a defined power limit and also control the charge rate.

But yeah, yet to find the endpoint to push power...
 
Time of Use power plans.. and also if you're using wholesale power prices which change every 30mins, especially in summer peak you can get paid pretty well for pushing to the grid in evenings. For short windows of time it's $ dollars per kw instead of cents.

Yeah i've looked at the API's to give you energy status, etc and I see you can do a call to recharge from the grid to a defined power limit and also control the charge rate.

But yeah, yet to find the endpoint to push power...
Those times when you are pushing out during peaks, isnt that also the peak for your home? So if you dont have power in your battery you will be buying at a peak.
Also fyi I ran the ‘wholesale rates’ and other charges on ambers website. Over last year a fixed agl retail rate is cheaper, for my circumstance. Probably because of the higher FIT.