Sept 2022 Solar PV Tesla Powerwall 2 battery stats and performance 

Thank Nickie for watching and for your stats. It's reassuring to see others have had poor solar production in September. Well done on just a 3.3kWh import - top job.

@@johntisbury lowest import we had in near 21 months and about 11500 kWh generation in less than 21 months in less than idea position especially in low sun months due to shading issues so quite happy with system performance it’s very helpful with current energy prices no wonder why so many people looking to get solar or add battery storage. But I still see people say solar and battery storage not worth the money etc we need more people to see videos and stats from real owners to show them they can and do work in uk ! That’s why I share my stats too to show that it’s not just dead south position that can be really good results like people think is the case .

100% this Nickie, we are past the early adopter stage now thankfully, however you will never get everyone on board.

@@johntisbury yer I know but it’s 😡😯 annoying and surprises you that people can be so blinkered just because they dont know or want a item to go and make bold clams that sometimes don’t work and some are even offensive and said that we are telling lies and have wasted our money I wouldn’t have them if you paid them etc like one of our friends moans about the price of fossil fuels and could get a ev if they wanted with drive etc and could test ours on a day trip etc they said they wouldn’t have a ev if you paid them but they never been in one or heard of first hand bad experience just because they read in the media that they bad like the crap you read in the daily fail or recently in the independent etc papers that you would think would have the facts but dont seems too ! 😡😳😱🧐🤨 Pepole believe the media more than real owners or knowledgeable people !

@@nickieredshaw7835 it's frustrating, however spend you energies on the people who are receptive and want information. It's very difficult to move someone who has deep rooted beliefs and often it's just not worth the effort or investment in your time.

Thaks Roel, September has been poor for solar, that's unusual as it's often not the case.

Thanks Lynn, great to hear how well you are doing for the year and 3 months ahead of last year's final total - that's great to hear. Let's hope it continues as you say.

Great news on your battery, yes that will make a massive difference to your usage. Seems the 30th Sept was poor for you too. Be interesting to hear how you have got on next month with your battery setup.

@@johntisbury yer battery storage helps this time of year next door neighbour just had batteries fitted they gone from 8-10 kWh imported a day to 200~300 watts and I enjoy it was shocked at the difference

Thanks Mark. Good luck with your move and hope it goes smoothly and trouble free.

Are you getting solar at your new home ? Hope all goes smoothly take care and safe travels

@@nickieredshaw7835 Yes that is the plan, need to get a structural engineer to assess the roof structure before we can look at options going forward.

@@markbrice2928 cool 😎 hope to see your solar updates in the future

Thanks for watching, yes low sun is not great.

Thanks Glyn, I hope so too. Thank you for watching.

Good stats Phil, might be downhill from now mind.

I will be interested to hear how you get on over the winter months with TEP and the ASHP. Are you near the upper usage limit for TEP?

@@johntisbury you can use up to 9kWp of solar panels per Powerwall 2 and the only limit is on daytime energy use from 0700 to 1930 must be less than 9500kWh per Powerwall installed: This is only for energy imported from the grid and due to solar we have not used much during the daytime since we got onto the plan.

Great to hear you are getting solar next year Andy. Perhaps do your own channel?

Thanks for watching and your stats. Hopefully I've answered your questions below: Could I ask why you moved gas tarrif and your expected savings? The Flexible tariff we were on was destined to change October 1st, so jumped before the 16p/kWh cap was increased to 22p onto the Gas tracker tariff. Not 100% sure if that's the best option, time will tell, however it seemed to be the lesser of two evils. Have you considered getting James from Cleveley to service your cars? By all accounts he really knows his stuff, just a thought. Yes I have. He is on my to contact and arrange a service list. What components are you using to get all the temperature and humidity readings on HA? As per the video, the SONOFF zigbee temp and humidity sensors are in each room. Connected to a Sonoff zigbee dongle 3 in the back of the Home Assistant Blue box I have, via a 3m USB extension cable. That's it.

Good solar production stats, you must be somewhere with good weather!

@@johntisbury it was mid quality September here in south of Frankfurt a.M..

Wow nice results even in September you got near the 1000 kWh mark would love more solar and bigger battery storage as now we start seeing grid import due to lower solar

We do not have cheap nightly power. Means only solar source. 1kWh prize is 0,32€

You can't stop it, your car charger will see it as available power and will use it. Time Based Control or Self Powered has no impact on whether it discharges to the car or not. Overnight off-peak charging amount is based on lots of factors. The key thing to make this work is to plug in your 'Utility Rate Plan' tariff rate so the Powerwall knows when it peak and off peak. I also recommend using the Super Off-Peak option for cheap rate and Peak rate as normal. Under sell put as lower figure you can, mine is 0.01p. Then under the Time-Based option choose Yes to Grid Charging question at the bottom of that screen. It takes a while for it to settle down and get into a rhythm. People that ping pong backwards and forwards between Time Base Control and Self Powered suffer from inconsistent results. Our Powerwall has been charging to 100% overnight since we swapped to Time Based Control at the end of September. It takes into account the amount of house usage each day, the amount of solar generated, any export to the grid, solar forecast. If there's lots of reserve left in the battery at the end of the day then it can often not charge to 100% overnight. Same too with exporting solar to the grid, that will trigger it not to charge to 100% overnight. As I say there are many factors it takes into account.

@@johntisbury thanks, what % do you set your backup reserve? Just changed changed the plan to what you suggested, problem may have been that since I had the solar installed I haven’t needed to pull from e grid, this is the only day I have had to import.

I have the Gateway 1 which has no reserve / backup option. Most people leave theirs at 20%. Yes, that makes sense, you will hopefully find it will do tonight as forecast is not great for tomorrow.

Hi Gary. Yes I use the Time-Based Control (rather than Self-Powered) this time of year. The key thing to make this work is to plug in your 'Utility Rate Plan' tariff rates so the Powerwall knows when it peak and off peak. I also recommend using the Super Off-Peak option for cheap rate and Peak rate as normal. Then under the Time-Based option choose Yes to Grid Charging question at the bottom of that screen. For the battery question, you need to set the zappi to avoid battery discharge in the menu. You'll need to check the manual for what menu option it is on. It does not always work, however more often than not it will and should use excess solar and not hit the battery. The zappi does not know you have a battery, it just sees excess power (eg non-grid) and will use it unless you tell it otherwise.

@@johntisbury Thanks John. I ended up having a second call with Tesla support today and they made some changes. Apparently they don't want a sell price above £0.03p. I also wasn't aware about that because I was toggling between Self-powered and Time-based that you can actually confuse the Powerwall and that it just won't charge to 100% during low tariff but take impending solar production the following day and the only charge what it believes will be needed. I was using my weather app to toggle between the 2 settings. I knew very little about the various settings because I want told at commissioning and there isn't anything simple to read to understand them!

Ah glad to hear things are sorted. I change twice a year between self-powered (Spring/Summer) and Time Based Control (Autumn/Winter). People I know leave it in Time Based Control all year. The algorithm does get confused if you bounce back and forth in consecutive days as it does not build up a picture of usage and patterns.

@@johntisbury Thanks John. One thing I forgot to ask the Tesla support this morning and that was whether I need to adjust the backup (green figures) up from my usual 20%? With Grid charging enabled it says "Powerwall will use the grid to charge to your backup reserve" But I'm guessing its the figure in blue Time-based control which I have set to 80%. That said she did say the algorithm might, based on weather prediction/likely solar production not even reach 80%

You don't really need to adjust the backup % unless you feel that power outages are imminent. I have the Gateway 1 so don't have functionality to have a reserve backup. Yes the algorithm will not always charge to 100% from the grid at off peak as it takes lots of factors into account.

Octopus Gas Tracker tariff changes daily and tracks the wholesale price of gas octopus.energy/tracker/ It's now capped at 22p/kWh per day, we swapped when it was capped at 16p/kWh.

@@johntisbury yer be interested to see what the tracker prices are in next month video was on this last summer as was super cheap went on fixed last year about this time as tracker was going up a good bit and got good fixed deal but this year our fixed is double but happy with 10 p a kWh gas at the moment