AIO and Prepping for a long outage

I have always looked rather askance at the "prepare" community.

But recent post here discussed an unfortunate consequence of a storm-related grid failure - the battery ran down and wouldn't power a solar inverter when the sun came out, leaving the house powerless for an unnecessarily long time. It got me thinking how to deal with the same situation, and I posted a potential methodology on the thread.

I have been thinking further about the consequences of a prolonged power outage (of more than 24 hours, say). My AIO/GW are hard-wired, and not currently configured to use wifi control. In particular:

• if there was a power outage which prevented domestic internet access (so an ISP network failure) what is the best (ie most reliable, most likely to work) way of controlling an AIO locally?
• Is it the GE phone app? Is this now reliant on an internet-available SSO procedure?
• The GE app does not allow access to all registers, so my preference to adjust Battery Cut-off Limit is not available. What local method to do this is available, and what resources does it depend on?
• Anyone have any thoughts about the steps I suggested on that thread (copied below for convenience)?
• Is the reported experience actually the AIO behaving as expected?

PianSom How's this for a storm protocol:

• in advance, move battery reserve limit to 75%
• when power cut hits go and turn off everything obvious, reduce battery reserve limit to 4% and ...
• ... move battery cut-off limit to 10%
• when SoC hits 20% (or it's sleep time) turn off router UPS, and possibly all ring main circuits in CU, leaving light circuits on
• wait for sun to shine
• turn on router UPS + wait for network to come up
• move battery cut-off limit to 4%; check inverter has come up
• wait for SoC to rise, then turn on freezer and charge UPS etc
• if SoC falls back to 20% repeat from reducing battery cut-off limit step

PianSom 75% reserve sounds a good idea if you can predict when a powercut is likely, but otherwise a lot of capacity will be "wasted". My Gen 1 AC 3.0 reverts to 4% automatically when on EPS. But the last major powercut was due to a digger slicing through a cable which took out most of a large town, so basically unpredictable.

wrefordj
Yeah, I was thinking of storm warnings in particular.

One of my last outages was someone slicing through a HV cable too.

PianSom Is it the GE phone app? Is this now reliant on an internet-available SSO procedure?
The GE app does not allow access to all registers, so my preference to adjust Battery Cut-off Limit is not available. What local method to do this is available, and what resources does it depend on?

The GE app has always been reliant upon an internet connection. All commands are always sent via the GE Cloud portal. Local mode is only for enquiring on current status.

The BBC basic app doesn’t allow you to change battery reserve limit or battery cutoff limit. I would guess the Rubik Cube Android app probably does. Otherwise you are going to need to go down the Home Assistant route or write your own scripts to control the inverter locally via modbus

I guess you could use the third party apps to drop discharge rate to zero or take it out of eco mode if changing the cut off isn't available in them? Not sure if those apps offer pause mode?

Another trick if the broadband is down, turn off the router, then on a mobile phone setup a WiFi hotspot with the same name (SSID) as the main router and same password.

You should then be able to get the inverter talking over that, fingers crossed, without any configuration needed.

Useful if the mobile networks are still up, or useful if keeping a phone on is going to use less energy than a router.

Once you've managed to communicate with the inverter, then perhaps turn off the hotspot and/or phone to save battery.

geoffreycoan you are going to need to go down the Home Assistant route or write your own scripts to control the inverter locally via modbus

Hmm, I was hoping to avoid booting up HA servers. But when I get my finger out I am going to have a dedicated Energy vlan and HA instance (running on a pi5), so that wouldn't be too awful.

Scripts is a reasonable idea. IIRC someone around here wrote some python routines already - is that right? I don't recall who ...

TX200 setup a WiFi hotspot with the same name (SSID) as the main router and same password.

Yeah, as I mentioned I use wired networking for the AIO/GW so that isn't going to help, sadly 🙁

PianSom Yeah, as I mentioned I use wired networking for the AIO/GW so that isn't going to help, sadly 🙁

Would a wifi extender node with ethernet ports in it (or even one port and a small switch) enable bridging from your phone hotspot?

I have an AIO/Gateway but no Solar PV yet. I'm hoping that in the event of a sustained power cut (30 mins or more) my full fibre broadband connection keeps going for as long as I can power the indoor ONT (Optical Network Termination).

I've got it on a UPS along with my Router, NAS, Switch and Home Assistant Server and it has enough ooomph to power them all for about 30 mins after the AIO runs flat.

I believe the fibre is continuous all the way from the house to the exchange, which I hope has some resilience against sustained power outages. I may have the misfortune to find out one day, but I'm in no rush to find out.

geoffreycoan Would a wifi extender node with ethernet ports in it (or even one port and a small switch) enable bridging from your phone hotspot?

Haven't come across such a thing (though it could exist). However there are devices which take a SIM and have an ethernet output, so that could be an alternative.

But, in the apocalyptic multi-day power-out scenario I am imagining, there would be no phone signal nor ISP internet (sorry @T-M ! you may have seen that my plan relies on my UPSs to keep my router/switches/servers going short term), so local control is what I am really looking for.

Anyway - that is probably enough time wasted thinking about something that will almost certainly never happen. I will keep an eye open for some minimal scripts that can control the AIO/GW just in case. But I will continue to sleep soundly.

You can run givtcp in docker on a windows laptop, send simple commands to docker from a web browser window.

You can start up docker when you need it and stop it again after. It's quite intensive on memory etc, so if you want to use your laptop for other stuff, you'll probably want to stop docker when done!

I did this before I went into the HA world.

Alternatively look at those mobile apps already mentioned. Much simpler but potentially a small cost to unlock the premium features which allows you to control rather than just read stuff.

Actually, I have just realised that I am wildly over-thinking the issue.

A far better solution is to just turn off the AIO when the SoC hits 10-20%, and then turn it on again when the sun comes out.

No messing around with UPSs, apps, servers, registers, ...

Der.

PianSom

Daveb01
I just saw!

Not just me that's been bitten by the paranoia bug then 🙂

Daveb01 so implement a version of storm watch from the Powerwall then.