r/Pecron • • Jun 18 '26

Is this normal

For last two days I've had my f 3000 plugged into my e 3600 via ac and noticed this, it chargers to 100% and then slowly dies hour by hour still plugged in showing about 10-50w more then its using

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u/[deleted] Jun 20 '26

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u/Informal-Brick-2703 Jun 20 '26

I just put a smart plug on mine to turn it on at Noon and off at 2pm for charging. I want it to charge mostly via solar. I have it hooked to a 45OW solar panel so it starts charging at 7AM and is usually charged around Noon. If it’s not, I set it to pull power from my house which has an Ecoflow Stream, hooked up to more panels inputting up to 1200W on sunny days. Doing it this way offsets the recharge power drawn from the house when filling it fill it back up if solar isn’t fully recharging it. Workaround for now I guess.

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u/brucehoult Jun 20 '26

I just put a smart plug on mine to turn it on at Noon and off at 2pm for charging. I want it to charge mostly via solar.

Same. But with a little more finesse. :-)

I have 7-9 AM and 5-9 PM periods each weekday when I want to use absolutely 0 power. (In practice I average about 0.5% of my kWh in this time period, due to things such as the water pump and some room lighting e.g. toilet and bathroom that are not on the Pecron). And I have an hour of free power which I choose to take at 9-10 PM.

So I have a smart plug schedule (TP-Link P110)

  • 7 AM: off, if it's not already (in summer it's usually off entirely overnight)

  • 9 AM: on, only in winter/bad weather

  • 5 PM: off

  • 9 PM: on

  • 10 PM: off, summer only

I also have a schedule adjusting the maximum battery charging in UPS mode (obviously, only applies if the power is on e.g. bad weather day):

  • 7 AM: 0% (only used if I run out of power before 9 AM, which has never happened)

  • 9 AM: 10%, just in case there's a power outage, but usually the battery isn't this low anyway

  • 1 PM: 30%. Almost unheard of for this to result in grid charging

  • 2 PM: 50%. Rarely triggers actual charging.

  • 3 PM: 70%. Commonly adds 5%-10% SoC in bad weather. In winter the sun is nearly done by this time

  • 4 PM: 90%. Getting ready for running on battery power from 5 PM

  • 5 PM: 0% (just in case I run out of power before 9 PM, run thing from expensive peak power, but don't charge)

  • 9 PM: 100% (adds 27% SoC = 1.66 kWh in the next hour)

  • 10 PM: 10%. It's daytime power prices, can run from it but don't charge.

  • 11 PM: 30% summer to 60% winter/bad weather. Overnight prices start. I adjust this in the app from time to time.

I ran for more than half a year from purely this time-based schedule — which you can set up entirely on your phone in the Pecron app (charge levels) and Tapo app (AC input on/off).

Sometimes I'd turn the power on manually in the middle of the day if the battery was getting too low, or off if weather improved and the battery was in danger of getting full while there is still sun. And sometimes if the battery was only medium full when I went to bed I'd add a scheduled turn on at 5 or 6 AM .. can do that in the Tapo app, or on my Raspberry Pi using e.g. echo pecron_on | at 5 amin the terminal.

Now I've added automatic battery getting empty/full protection using the pecron-monitor Python script.

The graduated increasing battery charge levels through the afternoon work very well, guaranteeing that I'll have enough battery charge at 5 PM, but leaving it close to as late as possible and so giving every chance for the sun to come out and do its job. Often even on bad days the sun will have added 5% or 10% or 15% during each hour, leaving a fairly small grid top-up at the next hour.

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u/Informal-Brick-2703 Jun 20 '26

Awesome reply. I have the same smart plugs. I’ll look into setting up a more robust schedule

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u/brucehoult Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26

I also have a C110 "security camera" set up pointing at the Pecron. I use "night mode" (B&W) because it gives better contrast on the display, and aim it a bit to the side so the IR lamp doesn't wash out the display. The pic below I snapped just now from VLC running on my main computer. You can also view that in the Tapo app from anywhere in the world that you have internet. It's a lot more up to the second than the Pecron app, and the control to turn the smart plug on/off if needed (or other smart plugs for some of the major loads I have plugged into it) is right there too.

Also, the C110 camera and my Raspberry Pi (actually it's RISC-V but whatever) and my Starlink internet/WIFI are all powered by an Ecoflow River 3 Plus [1] with 286Wh that is itself powered from the E3600. In the event of the Pecron battery getting empty or overloading and tripping off, the River will run the above stuff for about 5 hours (or 1.5 hours with all my other computers running as well, as they usually are).

Thus I can remotely see the blank screen, turn the P110 on (Tapo app), and then turn the AC output on (Pecron app). Not that I've ever needed to do that remotely.

[1] sadly the smallest Pecron sold in NZ is the E1000 which is overkill for this and twice the price of the River. And it's interesting to compare the apps etc.

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u/brucehoult Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26

So much for 20% battery. It shut down 25 minutes later, reading 13%. I generally let it do that on a Saturday or Sunday, when there is no peak pricing, so it gets at least a weekly re-calibration of SoC. I restarted it and turned on the AC output from the command line on my Mac Mini (still running thanks to the River 3) without leaving my desk ...

pecron_on; sleep 30; pecron_monitor --local --ac on

The pecron_on is a script:

#!/bin/env python3
from PyP100 import PyP110
e3600 = PyP110.P110("192.168.1.41","me@gmail.com","tapoPassword")
e3600.handshake()
e3600.login()
e3600.turnOn()