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Tesla App Utility plan configuration: Multiple Peaks, Buy/Sell Behavior, etc

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Over the last two years, Tesla sent out at least five different teams from two different offices, and we had three different sub-contractors on top of that. We didn't have a single onsite project manager. Each time a new crew would come out, no one knew anything about the project and we spent half the first day educating them about the prior blunders. This project has literally taken hundreds of hours on our part chasing Tesla to get things fixed and running correctly. This project was a monumental waste of time and we have been absolutely shocked at the complete disorganization of such a well known company.

We are not alone in our struggles, some of our neighbors are turning in leases and not renewing after having major issues on the car side as well. We were very excited early adopters, but it's safe to say at this point that we'll never buy anything from Tesla ever again.

@JayClark - glad to hear you got your solar installed and that everything is running smooth. We are in the process of adding a second solar system (adding 9.6 kW to a 4.4 kW system) since our usage went up so much with our electric cars usage. Tesla was $2.21/watt compared to another solar company who came in at $2.55/watt. Needless to say we didn't go with Tesla, and the added $2,500 (after taxes) will be well worth it if we don't run into half the issues we have had with Tesla.
Agreed. I'm a program/project manager in my day job, and I had every number and contact, called people daily, multiple time daily directly, and would be hesitant to do anything with Tesla on the solar side again as far as only adding Solar.

I have to admit, we have a Model Y and a Model 3, and I'd buy these again in a heartbeat. The onsite support for a couple little minor issues we've run into over the last couple years (12v battery died, replaced for free at our house, and a trunk button that needed to be reseated) have all been handled efficiently and with no muss, fuss or confusion simply through the app. Better than any car dealer service & support I've ever had to deal with over the years. So I will never buy through the traditional dealers again.
 
Over the last two years, Tesla sent out at least five different teams from two different offices, and we had three different sub-contractors on top of that. We didn't have a single onsite project manager.
Wow. I did have the same team and sub contractor stuff but luckily I had one onsite PM that showed up just before work started that verified that the design was going to work and everything physically was as depicted by the scouts sent out before. And he called before he showed up so I had his cell number. He never did appear again until I had my issues. And then he came out twice to get it resolved, once even after he changed positions and was no longer a PM.

I totally agree on Tesla slipping away from their customer support and even getting the products right. They seem to care only for one person, EM, and all other opinions or needs are considered moot. At the end of my extended warranty I am going to have to seriously consider what to do with my car. It will probably depend on what (if?) batteries are available at that time. I suspect none, or at a price that would equal a total new car. So like everything else these days, it will be cheaper to scrap it when it dies, than to fix it.:(
 
So, I'm new to all this. I have a new Solar Roof about 6.2kW, and two new Powerwalls. I'm in San Diego on SDG&E EV-TOU5 rate, which the settings in the app allowed me to configure easily; I assume it's correct and doesn't seem relevant to my question anyway.

Unless we plug in one of the cars and have driven it a fair distance, we easily get through the night using only the Powerwalls, and hey, it's San Diego so they usually fully charge during the day. But some of the various numbers in the app simply don't make sense. I attach 6 photos taken within one minute of each other just a few minutes ago.

IMG_0940.PNG


First the overview screen above. The sun is shining, the powerwalls are charging all is copacetic. But only 82% self powered? 0kWh from the grid, what is not self-powered?

IMG_0942.PNG


This is the Energy screen with the house selected. Pretty obvious really; the car started charging at midnight, was full after about 1.5 hours, then we woke up and started work and all that. According to the graph, all that power came from the powerwalls until the sun came up, then all from solar. But at the bottom it says 19% / "4.2kWh From Grid"?! Whaaat?

IMG_0944.PNG


So, let's look at the grid detail above. It shows a little bit drawn in from the grid, and two little bits sent back out. The numbers still don't make sense, though; the first spike out is bigger than the spike in, but it says 0.2 kW exported and 0.5 kW imported. Then it has the gall to tell me that I imported 4.4kWh, and exported 4.4kWh, for a net of 0. The net 0 I believe. but 4.4kWh doesn't agree with the 4.2kWh on the previous screen.

IMG_0943.PNG


So above we see the Powerwall screen, and the graph makes sense. You can see the car charging, the drain during the wee hours, then the Powerwalls charging again (not yet full). But it says "82% self powered". 18% here almost agrees with the 19% on the first screen, probably just different rounding directions since the screenshots were all taken within a few seconds of each other. But the blatant falsehood is that we used virtually no outside energy. In two places, it says 12.8kWh discharged.

IMG_0941.PNG


So what does the Solar screen say? It makes perfect sense, once the sun came up the roof started powering the house and then charging the Powerwalls again. Negligible energy sent to the grid, "<0.1%", "0.1kWh".

IMG_0946.PNG


And now the real question: under "Impact" it is still saying that the grid powered 19% of our energy, while we all know it powered virtually nothing, but I get 119% solar offset. I don't even know what that means.

I searched around and haven't been able to find any mention of these bogus numbers. I tried to get the guy from Tesla Energy who came out to handhold the inspection to explain them to me, and he couldn't.

... or maybe I'm hallucinating it all...
 
4PW - 14Kw (40% of that is mounted facing mostly NNW so unproductive this time of year)
PSEG Long Island Rate 193 (not yet in app so had to enter it manually) - Peak 6AM - 11PM, Current Season is Oct - May. Peak Delivery Charge is $0.10 vs $0.0595
I was expecting the PW's to charge up at night and then discharge during the day. I have reserve capacity set to 50% just because.
And that is where is stays. All excessive solar goes to the grid and the PW's do not charge at night. 4 PW's are enough for me to go the entire day without pulling from the grid but it is not doing that. What am I missing. Thank you
 
4PW - 14Kw (40% of that is mounted facing mostly NNW so unproductive this time of year)
PSEG Long Island Rate 193 (not yet in app so had to enter it manually) - Peak 6AM - 11PM, Current Season is Oct - May. Peak Delivery Charge is $0.10 vs $0.0595
I was expecting the PW's to charge up at night and then discharge during the day. I have reserve capacity set to 50% just because.
And that is where is stays. All excessive solar goes to the grid and the PW's do not charge at night. 4 PW's are enough for me to go the entire day without pulling from the grid but it is not doing that. What am I missing. Thank you
In the USA, Powerwalls paired with solar only charge from solar. If they're not charging with available solar, then something is wrong. Try rebooting the Gateway. If that doesn't work, open a case with Tesla Energy Support.
 
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View attachment 784563

First the overview screen above. The sun is shining, the powerwalls are charging all is copacetic. But only 82% self powered? 0kWh from the grid, what is not self-powered?

This first snapshot is a real time view of your energy flows, thus the moving green bars. This first view does not try to indicate any history of your usage or power flows., i.e. whether not earlier in the day you drew power from the grid. So while at the moment you took the snapshot you were not drawing (or sending -neg) to the grid at that moment. The 82% self powered however does hint that earlier in that day you had drawn from the grid at some point. (the later charts are for that).


View attachment 784561

This is the Energy screen with the house selected. Pretty obvious really; the car started charging at midnight, was full after about 1.5 hours, then we woke up and started work and all that. According to the graph, all that power came from the powerwalls until the sun came up, then all from solar. But at the bottom it says 19% / "4.2kWh From Grid"?! Whaaat?

Good question actually, and looking at all your other screen shots, I'd agree it seems like your home usage of grid is not showing up correctly for some reason. When you checked your power company usage on their web site, did that match the end of day grid draw/usage number you get from some of the Tesla charts, or did it say zero?

Out of curiosity, after looking at your charts is there a chance you have some circuits in your home that are not covered (backed-up) by the Powerwall. Even so it still seems like you shouldn't be seeing the conflicting numbers in different charts, but I don't know what the charts show when there are some circuits not backed up by the Powerwall since my whole house is backed up.

The only other thought I have is maybe there there is a current sensor either not working or inadvertently placed in the wrong location for your setup. Did it seem to behave correctly in the past? (I'm assuming this is a newly commissioned system maybe?).

Regardless, I'd gather up your actual daily usage/generation data from your utility for an example day like this, and then give Tesla energy support a call. I will recommend from experience that you approach Tesla from a perspective of curiosity and fact finding to understand what's going on, vs lead with the fact their system is "lying" to you. It won't help your search for information as they'll probably shut down on you with that approach. But it does seem like maybe something is inadvertently setup wrong.

While often Tesla energy support is pretty frustrating (I've run into this), at other times it seems surprising what they are able to somehow fix on their end once you give them a call.

Also, there is a reset button, at least on my gateway (blinking light in a hole, but I may have an older version of the gateway than you) that they once had me push for 10-15 seconds (or so) with a chopstick to reset the gateway. It solved some weird behavior where it wasn't seeming to behave correctly. That's happened twice over the last few years, the second time I didn't call support, just went and reset it myself and things seemed settled in and behaved correctly after a few hours.
 
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This first snapshot is a real time view of your energy flows, thus the moving green bars. This first view does not try to indicate any history of your usage or power flows., i.e. whether not earlier in the day you drew power from the grid. So while at the moment you took the snapshot you were not drawing (or sending -neg) to the grid at that moment. The 82% self powered however does hint that earlier in that day you had drawn from the grid at some point. (the later charts are for that).




Good question actually, and looking at all your other screen shots, I'd agree it seems like your home usage of grid is not showing up correctly for some reason. When you checked your power company usage on their web site, did that match the end of day grid draw/usage number you get from some of the Tesla charts, or did it say zero?

The only other thought I have looking at your charts is there a chance you have some circuits in your home that are not covered (backed-up) by the Powerwall. Even so it still seems like you shouldn't be seeing the conflicting numbers in different charts, but I don't know what the charts show when there are some circuits not backed up by the Powerwall since my whole house is backed up.

Regardless, I'd gather up your actual daily usage/generation data from your utility for an example day like this, and then give Tesla energy support a call. I will recommend from experience that you approach Tesla from a perspective of curiosity and fact finding to understand what's going on, vs lead with the fact their system is "lying" to you. It won't help your search for information as they'll probably shut down on you with that approach. But it does seem like maybe something is inadvertently setup wrong. Do you see this misalignment of the values every day?


Otherwise,
Thanks for the reply. Yes, this happens essentially every day, most days our use of grid power is zero or negative. This is backed up by our bills.

The guy who came to hand-hold the inspector did say that our configuration backed up only the main house, and not our pool or car charging. Maybe that contributes somehow that I'm not understanding. I'm still mystified. I will call them as you suggest.
 
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Thanks for the reply. Yes, this happens essentially every day, most days our use of grid power is zero or negative. This is backed up by our bills.

The guy who came to hand-hold the inspector did say that our configuration backed up only the main house, and not our pool or car charging. Maybe that contributes somehow that I'm not understanding. I'm still mystified. I will call them as you suggest.

Yeah, I edited my response also, to mention a reset button on the gateway that support had me use one time. Also possibly there is a current sensor placed incorrectly if there is no indication of actual grid usage like what you are seeing. Hopefully their support might be able to see that on there end to confirm if they're seeing no grid usage/draw at all also.
 
Thanks for the reply. Yes, this happens essentially every day, most days our use of grid power is zero or negative. This is backed up by our bills.

The guy who came to hand-hold the inspector did say that our configuration backed up only the main house, and not our pool or car charging. Maybe that contributes somehow that I'm not understanding. I'm still mystified. I will call them as you suggest.
There was a similar thread here from January:

Data display errors in Tesla Solar app

Maybe @jgleigh found a resolution?
 
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Thanks for the reply. Yes, this happens essentially every day, most days our use of grid power is zero or negative. This is backed up by our bills.

The guy who came to hand-hold the inspector did say that our configuration backed up only the main house, and not our pool or car charging. Maybe that contributes somehow that I'm not understanding. I'm still mystified. I will call them as you suggest.
I have not found a fix yet, but I also haven't bugged support yet. I've been debugging a different issue related to my WiFi.

@ggr Do you happen to have two site CTs setup? One using the main CTs in the gateway and a second one (little black box probably) setup to monitor the loads that aren't backed up? What I think is happening is that the app is getting confused when power is routed to the non-backup loads so it appears as both To Grid and From Grid. They cancel out so your true net grid usage is zero. The gateway clearly knows what is going on since it shows real-time grid usage of 0 kW as expected. The 'false' grid data then gets pushed into the Home tab and messes up the self-powered stats too. The graphs always appear correct though which is interesting.
 
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I'd be interested to hear if this makes a difference for you.
No, made no difference, my Powerwalls insist on cycling every day. I finally broke down and called Tesla Support. Her answer: you can't do that in the new app. Her other suggestion was to set my reserve at 95% instead of 85%, so it doesn't cycle as much/widely. :confused: So now, instead of cyling 100 to 85% it is cycling 100 to 95%, keeping the batteries near 100% most of the day. So much for my hopes to make them last 20 years. :mad:
 
4PW - 14Kw (40% of that is mounted facing mostly NNW so unproductive this time of year)
PSEG Long Island Rate 193 (not yet in app so had to enter it manually) - Peak 6AM - 11PM, Current Season is Oct - May. Peak Delivery Charge is $0.10 vs $0.0595
I was expecting the PW's to charge up at night and then discharge during the day. I have reserve capacity set to 50% just because.
And that is where is stays. All excessive solar goes to the grid and the PW's do not charge at night. 4 PW's are enough for me to go the entire day without pulling from the grid but it is not doing that. What am I missing. Thank you

I have this exact same issue. I used to have my Powerwalls set to time-based control with backup reserve at 97%. Every day, the 3% Powerwall charge was used during peak hours, then the next morning, the Powerwall would top off to 100% with solar production, then discharge again to 97% during the peak hours.

Recently, I changed my backup reserve to 50%. I kept the time-based control. Over the next few days, the Powerwalls discharging a little every day (I presume during peak hours) until they went from 100% to 50%. After reaching the 50% charge level, they no longer charge back up higher than that. I expected excess solar generation to go to the Powerwalls until they reached 100% or whatever the system calculated as required for cost saving at Peak hours. That is not happening. Instead, excess generation from solar is always going back to the grid. If there is no sufficient generation from solar during peak hours, it is pulling power from the grid instead of from the Powerwalls since they remain at the 50% backup level constantly. The Powerwalls are no longer helping to avoid pulling power from the grid in peak hours. The Powerwalls will charge above 50% with excess solar generation only if I set the back up reserve above 50%. Otherwise, they just stay put at 50%.

I have opened a Service Request with Tesla. Yet to hear back from them. Please let me know if you get this issue resolved. I will do the same.
 
@UnPluggedXX - Thinking about this further, have you set your Powerwalls for time-based control? If yes, what is your buy price vs your sell price? I think this might explain the behavior.

I am in a special situation where my per kwh sell price is higher than my buy price for both peak and off-peak hours. This is so special that the Tesla app actually gives me an error message saying my sell price shouldn't be higher than my buy price. I think that Tesla is not using the Powerwall to power my home because it considers selling to the grid to always be more economical than using Powerwall charge. Normally this would be true. Only issue - my peak hour cost also includes a demand (kw) price component that I cannot set in the Tesla app. And this component really jacks up my on-peak charges if I don't keep my usage low. So, I really really need the Powerwall to kick-in during the peak hours. But the way the app is designed right now, I can't get it to do that. I will see what Tesla support will tell me when they respond to my service request.
 
@UnPluggedXX - Thinking about this further, have you set your Powerwalls for time-based control? If yes, what is your buy price vs your sell price? I think this might explain the behavior.

I am in a special situation where my per kwh sell price is higher than my buy price for both peak and off-peak hours. This is so special that the Tesla app actually gives me an error message saying my sell price shouldn't be higher than my buy price. I think that Tesla is not using the Powerwall to power my home because it considers selling to the grid to always be more economical than using Powerwall charge. Normally this would be true. Only issue - my peak hour cost also includes a demand (kw) price component that I cannot set in the Tesla app. And this component really jacks up my on-peak charges if I don't keep my usage low. So, I really really need the Powerwall to kick-in during the peak hours. But the way the app is designed right now, I can't get it to do that. I will see what Tesla support will tell me when they respond to my service request.
So, in fact, your buy is higher than your sell during Peak when the demand charge is included. I would think the obvious answer is to raise the Peak Buy price above the Peak Sell price so that it will use battery energy. Also, make sure that the Peak Buy is significantly higher than the Off-Peak Sell price.
 
So, in fact, your buy is higher than your sell during Peak when the demand charge is included. I would think the obvious answer is to raise the Peak Buy price above the Peak Sell price so that it will use battery energy. Also, make sure that the Peak Buy is significantly higher than the Off-Peak Sell price.
I agree with you and I am pretty sure the system treats this as a binary calculation. Its either good for Cost Savings or bad, so the amount itself is not important. That drives the behavior of the system to charge PWs and send power to the grid etc.

I think the only place the actual value is used is in the eye candy Impact panel where the app displays the calculated monetary value that they think they have earned for you.
 
So, in fact, your buy is higher than your sell during Peak when the demand charge is included. I would think the obvious answer is to raise the Peak Buy price above the Peak Sell price so that it will use battery energy. Also, make sure that the Peak Buy is significantly higher than the Off-Peak Sell price.
I thought of doing this. In fact, I approached it the other way around - I tried to set the peak sell price to be lesser than the peak buy price. However, it wouldn't let me save the setting without also changing the off-peak sell price to be lesser than the off-peak buy price. I don't want to do this because I want to avoid using the Powerwalls during off-peak hours. Believe it or not, my off-peak sell price is DOUBLE the off-peak buy price. Those are my money making hours!
 
I thought of doing this. In fact, I approached it the other way around - I tried to set the peak sell price to be lesser than the peak buy price. However, it wouldn't let me save the setting without also changing the off-peak sell price to be lesser than the off-peak buy price. I don't want to do this because I want to avoid using the Powerwalls during off-peak hours. Believe it or not, my off-peak sell price is DOUBLE the off-peak buy price. Those are my money making hours!
The problem is that you make a little by exporting during Off-Peak, but you have a huge penalty if you don't have enough energy during Peak. If you just set the Off-Peak buy and sell to be equal and less than the Peak buy and sell, then the batteries will charge to full and then naturally export your surplus. The way you have it set, the batteries don't charge and that's not a good thing.
 
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Just got utility rate plan feature.
I'm in NSW, Australia.
Interestingly, it coincided with PW f/w v22.1.1
Using Android app v4.4.4-847

Given most NSW (Australian?) ToU energy plans have Summer, Winter, and an Autumn/Spring season plan, the current 3 seasons maximum doesn't work. At least i can't see a way to set it up for the full year as is? We need to be able to have 4 seasons, or, define multiple dates ranges for a single season to use it twice, e.g Autumn/Spring which has same rate plan.
Yay! Can now have more than 3 seasons!