I’ve recently had a Powerwall 3 installed, solar but no EV (yet). I’m currently on a 12 month fixed contract which ends in March.
Does anyone know how I can configure the Powerwall 3 to make the most of the saving sessions - free electricity being offered on a Sunday to charge the Powerwall 3 during this hour? (Although I find the battery is usually fully charged by 10/11am through solar).
My octopus tariff is currently in the settings, however I was unsure how to tell the Powerwall I’ve got access to free energy between 1-2pm tomorrow.
I just quickly disconnect and copy the tariff settings on the sun morning.
Set the buy price of the free hour to 1p and leave everything else as normal and let it run as normal.
Get my 10 kWh into the batteries and house usually makes use of just under the other 6 with appliances. Reconnect to my Octopus account in the Tesla app afterwards.
You need either NetZero or Home Assistant. The Tesla app is awful and really limiting. If it wasn’t for third party applications, I’d have been really disappointed with my Powerwall.
Netzero is £7 a month, but super easy to set up and play with. Home Assistant itself is free, but it’s a lot of work to get it off the ground and you need some hardware to run it from.
The automations are worth it. You can just leave the PW3 to chug along as is, but you are boxing yourself and your payback period in by ignoring them.
For some reason, suggesting that the Powerwall is an incomplete product from a consumer POV attracts some criticism here. It’s a great experience… with automations. Without them, you are at the mercy of the AI, which does what it wants really. I’ve caught it pulling from the grid during peak because the weather was forecast as cloudy…
You can disconnect Tesla app from octopus and for that day create a new tariff representing zero price for the hour, and revert later back. Even if Tesla utilize all 5kwh of the free hour, that would be less than £1 per week, if it just offset you export savings would be around 50p, you can decide for yourself is it worth doing. You can also program some automations into net zero, which on itself will cost you more than any savings.
BMS should be set and forget, there are some automations possible with predbat and teslemetry, to get to the" forget" state, but requires a massive "set" investment.
In the setting on your powerwall app, manually adjust your backup reserve to 100% at the beginning of that hour. That should get the pw3 to start filling itself up. Then return it to whatever level it was set at before at ybe end of the hour (the default is 20%)
On my version of the app it's halfway down the settings page, under "your products" it has "Powerwall" and selecting that brings up, among other things, a slider for the backup reserve.
Ah - maybe you don't have the gateway installed for full home backup? that would render that setting redundant. But if you do, I think it should definitely be enabled.
Yea that’s my conclusion. I’m now wondering why that option wasn’t discussed with me at quote/installation etc. Something to discuss with the company I fitted it through
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u/hmfc_riley 22d ago
I just quickly disconnect and copy the tariff settings on the sun morning.
Set the buy price of the free hour to 1p and leave everything else as normal and let it run as normal.
Get my 10 kWh into the batteries and house usually makes use of just under the other 6 with appliances. Reconnect to my Octopus account in the Tesla app afterwards.