Newbie Question - Grid pull rather than PV or Battery during day..

Hi there,

Hoping someone can explain this for me as it may just be normal behaviour.

I was expecting if the house demand goes up the available battery and PV would offset the house demand as priority. However until the battery is full, if demand is high in the home such as a tumble dryer or dishwasher is on, it pulls from the grid and pv continues to divert to battery as a priority.

Is this normal or can this behaviour be changed? I have searched on the forum but cannot find the answer to this or perhaps my search criteria was poor.. sorry if already a well asked query.

Cheers.

EV Charger charging? It might be worth saying what you have installed.

SilverArt

Sorry - see below.

4.35kw PV Array
GEN2 GE 5kwh Hyb Inverter with a Gen2 9.5kw Battery.
No Car charger
No Tarif setup and everything set to default in settings
Firmware all up to date

Now it is over 80%.. it does what I expect it to do (image below). So just confused if there is a setting somewhere to stop this behaviour or somewhere it explains why the inverter makes these decisions?

Ransom12 are we talking a short import for up to 30 seconds that's captured at each 5 min data point? What's the total import?

The inverter has a ramp up period, takes up to 30 seconds to meet a change in demand, so there may be a small period where the grid meets demand until the battery takes over

Cdent

Yeah I assumed much like a flywheel it takes a short period to adjust to meet demand.. however the data shows something totally different where it is Grid to Battery rather than what I visually was watching for 10 mins or so +, which was grid to home.. I guess the visual representation is wrong but happy to ignore that, just wanting to know more about why the battery was pulling demand from the grid in such large amounts when realistically it should be really minimal.

eg. 0.48kwh in that 30 min period was the unusual behaviour

Ransom12 is your CT clamp the right way round? have a check and make sure the arrow is pointing towards the consumer unit

Cdent

CT clamp is on the in feed from grid facing in the direction towards the consumer unit.

My import export leds on the front of the inverter constantly flicks between import > export > import > export > import > export every few seconds - is that normal?

What discharge mode have you configured ? You probably want "dynamic" (or eco), but if you have configured timed discharge, then the rest of the time the battery will charge, not not discharge, which is the behaviour you're seeing.
It's also possible to "pause" charging, discharging or both.

Ransom12 open the clamp and make sure the arrow is pointing the right way

As for the LEDs, there will always be a small handshake between inverter and grid to check frequency and voltage, but not sure how fast they should flick between the two

Ransom12 I think that may be the problem, I thought the CT clamp should be pointing towards the meter.

SilverArt depends whether it is on the live or neutral 😁

It also depends on whether it has been wired up correctly at the other end

And wether it was manufactured with the arrow pointing the right way (apparently there's a batch that are wrong). 🤦

NB. If it's on the neutral, it'll work as long as it's not a shared neutral. Basically single phase electric is fine, but if there's two or three phases - have to monitor the live that the inverter is connected to.

For your scenario, it does sound like it just needs swapping around so it points to the consumer unit. 😀

The CT clamp is in the right position.. turning it around did this... 🤔

The behaviour of the unit when the battery is full is absolutely fine. Takes from battery just normal.. it is only when the sun is blazing and the battery is not full, it opts to use grid over battery / pv instead.

So you can see from the next image at 12:00 and just before 13:00.. then as the battery charge gets above 80% it then uses PV to home and battery, prioritising the home and uses solar and battery to make up the difference, and not engaging the grid.

Might be best to reset the settings to default, wait ten mins, check eco mode is on, add a timed charge window and percentage if you want an overnight grid charge and then see how it goes.

Don't enable timed discharge or timed export unless you fully understand the implications of this - read the other posts about these subjects, plus consider reading up on automation options too (e.g. GivTCP, home assistant, API, python, powershell etc).