Battery discharge consistently greater than usage?

4 comments started 2024-07-03 last 2024-07-03
GivEnergy ProductsBattery
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#1 Garuff

I’ve been starting to look into our base load, see what’s drawing power overnight (fridges and PCs mainly I think), but I’ve noticed that my battery is discharging a fair amount more than I’m consuming, often >33% (even after accounting for minor export fluctuations adding to the battery load)
Now, I realise this screenshot is a bit insignificant in the scheme of things - ie showing 10w/hour difference - but this behaviour is seen through the day too, just messier to show due to solar/import/export all being higher and more variable.
Is this effectively battery losses that I’m seeing?
Thanks for any thoughts

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#2 Vestas

Garuff Conversion losses from DC-AC when discharging, vice-versa when charging. Full rate charge/discharge has losses of around 15-20% round trip.

Edit - chemical-based losses in the actual battery cells are around 3-5%.

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#3 DD

Garuff see what’s drawing power overnight (fridges and PCs mainly I think),

Don't forget the inverter itself, as well as the battery. They will be consuming power from the battery, but those won't show up in the load charts.

#4 hoggy

You're just seeing system losses. None of the system is zero sum sadly.
I don't actually know the efficiency curve of these but they do seem to struggle more at lower loads but I've no data to back that up. An experiment for some point I guess.
You can (crudely) work out losses by subtracting various inputs & outputs to work out the difference (equally the app itself has a setting where you can turn this calculation on & off to "massage" the figures so they all add up nicely or not).
I did a similar thing in HA with a custom sensor (although more to fill a gap than anything else):