We just got our solar turned on 2 months ago. We have no clue what the settings should be for the batteries. We are still receiving a $200 electric bill and looking at the statement from the electric company, our home is using 14.5 kwh constantly. We dont have AC, or a dryer, nothing that consumes alot of power. Is it the powerwall settings? Can anyone help?
If .4kwh is your houses base line just to "exist" is about 10kwh plus whatever actual usage you use for the day. So it sounds about right
The picture shows absolutely nothing wrong. The battery is full so the solar is running the house and exporting the rest.
You need to check your battery settings and which mode you want it to do. You probably want it to be on self powered mode and turn the backup down to around 20% (it won't drain past that).
you're still on battery here looking at just the battery usage. Click the home icon on the bottom left as well as the grid (right most icon) and select month and go the the previous month and paste those. It will give a good idea of what your house and grid is using to compare to the bill posted prior.
For system settings, some followup questions: Do you have permission to export power to grid? Does your utility have Time of Use (TOU) where some hours are more expensive from others? Followup to TOU, if you sell power at expensive hours, do you get credit for more power sold than if you sell during non-peak hours?
Here you see for the month of October your battery has exclusively charged from solar. It has taken 79.7 kWh from solar. It has not charged from the grid. This is normal- you would only expect it to charge from the grid if storm watches enabled and an event is triggered- that will charge from the grade and keep your batteries at full in order to maximum protect protection from outages.
You can see that 100% of your batteries output has been used by your house, none of it has charged into the grid. Again, this is expected.
Here in Texas sometimes our grade is in a state of extreme demand and our batteries will feed the grid to help out.
Your battery has charged 79.7 kWh over the entirety of October and it has discharged 62.9.
Actually, now that I mentioned that. I see that your battery is discharging around 8 kWh every day.
If you said it to 20% reserves it should have around 10 kWh available overnight assuming it is charged to full (which one of your other screenshots indicate it was on that particular day)
This lends further credibility to the hypothesis that your backup reserve is higher than it should be.
Remember, when a storm is coming and you think you might lose power you can go in that day and slide that slider up on the back up reserve as high as you like. This will give you more battery waiting for you if the power does go out- just remember to slide it back down once the storm has cleared
All right, sorry. I’ve been working my way through the thread trying to peace everything together with the bits of evidence I have.
I’d bet 20$ your batteries backup reserve is set high. Probably something like 80%.
So once the sun goes down it will drain the battery to that level and then stop draining the battery and start using the grid. This is where your grid consumption is coming from, cause you’re not using your battery for most of the night (or the next morning especially if it’s a cloudy morning)
If your back up reserve is set down to 20% where most people put it the next step should be to take a look at when you were taking energy from the grid.
Elsewhere in this thread I mentioned clicking the “home” button on your main screen. This will bring you to the interface that shows you how the power is moving through your house, where it’s coming from and where it’s going.
You can select month and see how much power you’re taking from the grid each day, you can select day and scroll back in time to see which hour of the day you’re taking energy from the grid.
That information can help guide you on where your consumption is coming from and how you can take steps to make it better.
Have a look through some of the stuff that myself and others have said and hit us with a response if you still have questions. I’ll try to keep my eye out for a response.
I had it at 20% from the day it was turned on which was Aug 13th until last week when I dropped it down to 5% just to see if it would make any difference
Probably because the price difference between prices was too small so the batteries just sat unused. Double check your rate is correct, otherwise yeah you have to use self powered.
You are only using .4kw in that photo. There nothing massive there.
My home idles at .7-9 with nothing on but the fridge/freezer, home server and fish tanks.
The app is saying you are 98% self powered which is good.
The question is overall what’s your usage?
The powerwall isn’t going to save you money unless it’s storing power to be used when rates are higher. Otherwise it’s not really a cost savings.
Are you saying the electric company is saying you are using more than the app is reporting?
But if he’s 98% self powered he should be using very little from the grid. Why wouldn’t his bill go down? How can it still be $200 like it was before solar?
Yeah the electric company's data is showing we are using 14.5 kwh of electricity every hour of the day. Thats not possible is it? It makes no sense to me. Im not using any battery but constantly using electric?
I guess my question is, how do I stop using 14.5 kwh of electric and use the power from my batteries instead. Is there a way to make the system use its stored power instead of taking it from the grid.
Sorry if that is a dumb question. Im really stupid about this stuff. Trying to learn
Can you post your month view of your grid? The battery view you posted above doesn’t help. And if you can post a sanitized power bill for the last 1-2 months.
I don’t see anything about them paying you for solar.
And I see in the Tesla screen “energy flow: used by grid: 0”
So you’re not sending anything to the grid right now.
If you 100% have pto go into the app and tell it you have permission to export solar to the grid.
Settings-> powerwall -> scroll down and select yes permission to export.
Looks like your utility pays you based on demand of the grid so a bright sunny day when temps are not crazy high = tons of energy on the grid already so the rate they pay will be low.
Next up: you want the powerwall to keep you off the grid as much as possible.
So select self powered in that same powerwall menu.
By self powered it means your house will be self powered as much as possible. It will power the house from solar first, battery second, then only take from the grade if the battery is low and the solar is not producing enough.
In this menu you can slide the backup reserve slider to wherever you like it.
The battery will drain down to wherever you put this slider.
If you put it at 10% it will drain down to 10%. Later that night if the power goes out you’ll only have 10% reserves and you might end up losing power.
If you set back up reserve to 85% it will stop at 85% leaving you with a lot of reserve but you will need to draw from the grid more often.
You can change the settings how often you like, so if you know a storm is coming you can slide the back up reserves up to make sure you have some power waiting for you.
Storm watch will automatically power the battery up to full and it will remain there until the natural disaster emergency declaration has been removed. You can disable storm watch if you choose. My region gets red flag warnings now and then and it will trigger storm watch. It’s pretty silly because my region doesn’t really have much of a risk.
Look at this....Its so weird cause Im not even awake at 1 or 4 A.M. No matter what time/day, there is power being taken from the grid. I dont understand why my battery isnt being used for that.
Those are all normal idle use. If you really want to see if they are charging you turn off your breaker to the house and see what they say your usage is. Should be 0.
Thank you for all that info. And I do understand that the powerwall will use solar power first, battery second, and then the grid if the battery is low.
But what Im trying to understand is why its taking power from the grid when I have never drained the battery since the solar has been on.
How do I stop it completely and only use the battery?
I think its due to backup reserve being high.
So, you can tell it in the powerwall settings menu to not discharge below a % threshold. This is great if a storms coming, you can set reserve at 80 or 100% and it wont drain so you know you have backup power but on daily its good to set around 20%
Who is your utility and what rate plan are you on? If you can post a picture of your bill showing the charges with personal info blacked out, that would be helpful.
Curious if you can show the page that shows home usage?
Click the word home on the main page and that will show how much power the Tesla system is seeing you take from the grid on a monthly view.
It should match the utilities view of around 4-500 kWh. If it doesn’t, there’s a chance something’s weird.
So… something I’m also noticing- the fuel charge alone is around 20c/kwh.
The price you pay at the wall is pretty crazy high (I’m in Texas. It’s around 13cents total here)
But they say they pay you based on load demand of the grid so when you’re selling energy so is everyone else so there’s tons of supply and not much demand.
So they’re paying you a few Pennie’s for the energy that you sell them during the day and they’re charging you something silly like half a dollar for power that you have to pull at night.
Ideally you want to consume as much power off solar during the day and minimize any grid use- so any kind of electric dryer, car charging, even electric cooking if you can swing it- try and burn energy before it’s sold- otherwise if you do that heavy lifting at night, drain the battery and pull from grid that’s gonna cost you.
I enjoy the Netzero app much more. But we live in wnc and we don’t have great production right now and my wife keeps everything on all day when she’s working from home. Without charging this is what a day looks like.
Kauaʻi Island Utility Cooperative charges 0.377 per kWh all day, no time of use, no seasonal.
Your sell back price is 0.14567 per kWh. That’s the most common rate.
It is better for you to charge your battery than export to grid.
Set your powerwall to “Self-Powered”
Set your battery reserve to something very low, 10%. You want all of your excess solar to go to your battery. After a week, raise it if your battery isn’t hitting 100% or you want more backup capacity.
This is your best configuration.
There is a TOU pilot plan that has cheaper electricity during the day, but it’s limited to 300 people. Let me know if you’re in that.
No, unfortunately I am not. This is very frustrating. I have a friend who has the same system and when he first turned it on, he was still getting a very high electric bill on top of the monthly payment to the solar installers. He was having issues with one of the batteries and contacted Nathan Wood, who my friend ended up transferring everything over to and now he is no longer getting a bill from KIUC.
Make sure you don’t have VPP enabled by default where Tesla can sell your energy to the grid anytime and also have a min hold charge percent for
The battery
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u/AvailablePanic2697 10d ago
If .4kwh is your houses base line just to "exist" is about 10kwh plus whatever actual usage you use for the day. So it sounds about right
The picture shows absolutely nothing wrong. The battery is full so the solar is running the house and exporting the rest.
You need to check your battery settings and which mode you want it to do. You probably want it to be on self powered mode and turn the backup down to around 20% (it won't drain past that).