Help: Batteries at 100% but only drawing from grid?

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  • otherchuck
    Junior Member
    • Dec 2022
    • 21
    #1

    Help: Batteries at 100% but only drawing from grid?

    Greetings all,

    I have a Solaredge system with a pair of LG batteries. I discovered yesterday that for the last few days the battery has been at or close to 100% the whole time and yet I am getting no power to the house from the batteries. Instead, I have been drawing from the grid. There in no red light on on the inverter so I don't think the inverter has gone dysfunctional (we are on our third inverter, so I am always suspicious of that part of the system whenever things go wrong). I have not touched any system or battery profile settings at all, and in fact don't know how I would do so. We got a little rain on about the day our batteries stopped discharging, but I rather expect batteries are supposed to be waterproof (they have been subjected to rain before), so I can't believe that could have shorted something out or tripped something, but in the absence of any other explanation, I am wide open to all possibilities.

    Its a holiday today, but tomorrow I will contact Solaredge about this, but I know from past experience that their response will be "contact your installer." And sadly, as I also know from past experience, it will be minimally 6-8 weeks before our installer does anything to help; they are rock-bottom terrible. So I am wondering if there is anything I can try myself to resolve the problem. As I said, I didn't change a setting in the system and battery profile, but maybe magically a setting got changed to "Always draw from grid before battery" or "Never let battery go below 99%."

    Any thoughts or suggestions at all are incredibly welcome! Happy New Year!

    Otherchuck
    Tags: None
    • otherchuck
      Junior Member
      • Dec 2022
      • 21
      #2
      Update: I got into the battery management section of the solar management app on my phone (for some reason can't do it on the solar dashboard app I usually use on my computer) and found that my backup reserve level had been set to 100%! I certainly didn't set it to that as I had never been to that section of the phone app before, so how it got set to 100% reserve is another of life's little mysteries. Any thoughts? I wonder if Solaredge did a firmware update that somehow messed with the reserve level.

      I set the reserve level to 20% and will monitor tonight and tomorrow to make sure the batteries are running to the house as intended. But I had a related question: When setting the level to 20%, I could not save that change until I selected a "duration." One option for this was "unlimited" and I think the rest were for 24 hrs, 48 hrs, 72 hrs, etc. I chose unlimited, but I am not certain what "duration" implies here. Does it mean that if I am expecting a possible power outage due to an upcoming storm or grid maintenance, I might want to set the reserve temporarily to 80%, but only for the next 72 hrs, after which the reserve level goes back to default? So if I set it to 20% for "unlimited" duration, that just means it always stays at 20%?

      Thanks!

      Otherchuck

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        • Rade
          Solar Fanatic
          • Aug 2023
          • 106
          #3
          I have battery backup connected to my Generac inverter and that is connected to my arrays and to the grid. This time of year, I keep my batteries at 100% charge on the chance the power goes out. Also because I live in Rhode Island and the sun is way lower on the horizon at the moment - depleting the batteries will take any power I get during these short winter days to recharge it.

          Through the inverter settings screens, I change the battery utilization settings from "Self Supply", meaning that once the sun sets, our home will use the batteries until they reach the low discharge threshold of 20-30% (depending on season) before it switches to Grid power. This was great this past summer - for 3 months we were able to run the house off the batteries overnight, then the arrays would come online around 5AM and start recharging.

          This time of year, dawn is still around 7AM and the arrays don't start producing until nearly 9AM. I keep the inverter set to "Clean Backup", meaning that the batteries are kept to100%, and when the sun sets (still in the 4PM hour) the inverter switches over to Grid power. It's in the 11AM hour and my arrays have hit peak generation around 7.5kW. I am pumping anything extra I can back to the grid to offset the household usage.

          Check your inverter settings, you probably have something similar.
          Rade Radosevich-Slay
          Tiverton, RI

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