Just had the solar panels, inverter and battery installed today. I am checking the app in the evening and it fluctuates between using all of the battery to cover the home load, to importing a little from grid and exporting a little to the grid.
How do I make sure the battery is only covering the home load and not exporting to grid/improving from grid?
I'm looking to move to octopus soon to try and get on the flux tariff.
Any advice on settings would be greatly appreciated.
The inverter is wired in parallel to your house with a current sensor. The only way it can power your house from the battery, or the solar panels and not export is to put exactly the same current onto the wires as your house is taking leaving nothing flowing through the meter from the grid, and it has to respond to changes in the load. In practice the control is not perfect so it can export a little or import a little and it flips between the two states.
The smart meter averages over 1/2 hour periods and it averages to very close to zero and can be ignored.
The little imports/exports you cannot stop unless you have an off grid mode id assume, its just a little fluctuation whilst the power demands go up and down in your home and they really don't use that much throughout the day.
This has been our home so far this month, mum has a shower that she keeps on high flow and its ~ 10kw shower so goes over the 6kw for the AIO unit, other than that its just the little ups and downs throughout the day as load changes and there is a bit of communication between the system and the grid.
Here is some info ive been collecting this month, it has precise readings from the homes IHD (assuming I don't forget lol) and what Givenergy reports when I check and since the portal only shows one decimal places it rounds up.
You can see its not that much overall throughout the day and you can tell when the shower has run long when you look at the 0.117/0.115 hehe
Edit
Above is day ray/flux rate
Karl340 On the App (did you install it on a device yet?) make sure the Inverter mode is set to "eco" and see if this evens things out for you? Also, allow for the sun to charge up the battery via the panels, if you are drawing more power than the battery contains, the system WILL pull juice from the grid to "keep the lights on".
Enjoy.
And, welcome to the Community 🙂
DavidE hi David. Yeah it's set to Eco. I'll have to keep an eye on it until I switch over to octopus flux soonish
Karl340 ]
Depending how much battery you have and inverter size, you might find Eco7 is better over winter as you get 7hr charge slot and with little sun you may not have much to export