My response was in regards to the original post by Dan saying he couldn’t cover 2 peak periods effectively. I was just curious what was different between him and I. Mine works and he seems to have an issue covering 1 large demand period.
The other reason this works for you is because you have a relatively large solar system that with relatively low Arizona winter time power loads, your solar can easily power your home while at the same time charging the PW to still have enough juice for the true evening peak even though you've effectively setup a 16hour peak window that includes 8 hours of actual TOU off-peak hours. I'm in Arizona too, on the same TOU plan, but I only sized a 4kW PV system and this works fine for me also, but only for now in the winter, and only if I don't want to charge my EV between the morning and evening peaks. If I do want to charge between peaks from 9am-5pm (at the cheap off-peak rate), or do some laundry/drying during the middle of the day off-peak hours, then I won't have enough Solar to power the home all day and recharge the PWs, so I really need to
not be forced to have my peak window set like you do all the way from 9am to 5pm (all though I have a work around I mention below).
This is because the car will charge at 4kW for for up to 3-4 hours during the day on most days, the clothes dryer can use up to 6kWs for chunks of time, and if I've set all the day-light hours to be a "peak" in the app as you have done, the system will direct all solar, and some PW juice to charging the car and running the house, and then the PW won't be sufficiently "recharged" to handle the house load during peak from 5-9pm in the evening after solar has stopped generating - but only because of the configuration limitations of the app. If I could set two peaks, and then have it be configured for true off-peak between the two, then I'd be fine.
I'm planning on adding more solar at some point, but even then I don't want my powerwall(s) running house loads during the very cheap non-peak hours, as that would just be potential un-needed PW charge/dis-charge cycles during the cheap rate off-peak hours, which really doesn't make sense for me financially - i.e. not a good use of my PW investment as ultimately the PWs are consumables that over time lose capacity based on the number of overall charge cycles they experience. If the house has enough solar, like you do, in that it truly it can power all home loads, while recharging the PWs, without using the PW to cover home loads during non-peak hours (even though the app is configured with one giant peak period as you've done) - then one giant period that includes off-peak hours is okay.
Having said all that, and even with having a much small PV system, I'm actually configured this way too with one large 16 hour peak window Mon-Fri, but only because I can use Darwins Smarthings based Powerwall Manager app on an automated scheduled to talk to Tesla servers to bump the reserve % up to a high level (usually 90%) to force all solar to go to recharge the PW right after the morning peak (9:01am), and then right before the evening peak (4:40pm, to allow some 20 minutes of slack for potential delays for the change taking effect before 5pm) I lower the reserve down below what I need (usually 10%) until the next day - all of this only so I can work around the Powerwall app configuration limitations and not have to pay to oversize my solar just because of limitations in the app configurations options.
