Sol-Ark insists on selling 500W to the grid at all times?

I'm trying to understand the different Sol-Ark 15k settings, which I find extremely confusing... I have no loads upstream of the Sol-Ark, i.e., everything is connected to its load output. I believe this makes "limit-to-home" and "limit-to-load" identical, but I'm not sure. (I do have the CTs, which is kind'a pointless.) It's not clear whether there's some difference in terms of priority.
The issue I'm having is that unless I check one of the "limit-to" options the Sol-Ark insists in selling a minimum of 500W to the grid, even when everything is being powered by the battery, i.e., it's selling battery power to the grid. I really don't want that. Perhaps the answer is to simply check "limit-to-load", but still, it's strange and confusing.
Here's how it looks, the graph shows grid power (positive=buy, negative=export) and I was on "limit-to-home" most of the day until about noon when I switched the "limit-to-home" off. I have the TOU setting configured to drain the battery between 4pm and 9pm, which is the peak time for me (southern California), but I don't really want to sell battery power to the grid. Solar dipped to very little ~6pm and load consumption at that time was several kW.

I have "zero export power" and "max sell power" set to 10W. None of the TOU settings have "sell" enabled. I'm waiting for the interconnect agreement so I have no benefit in selling to the grid at the moment, but in any case, I don't really want to sell battery power even if I was getting some money back. Any thoughts?

Uncheck "grid sell".
Check "limit to load". Limit to home is ok, but you have to make sure the CT's are correctly installed.
check "time of use"
Uncheck all the "charge" and "sell" boxes.
Under battery, put 100 in all boxes except 4pm to 9pm.
In the 4pm -9pm box, put 10%. Adjust times if you have to.
Push the setup button next to time of use, and check all days of the week, and uncheck all the season boxes.

Thanks, I know that by checking "limit-to-xxx" I can get it to practically zero out the grid. But once I have the interconnect agreement I will want it to sell excess solar to the grid. But then I won't want it to also sell 500W of battery to the grid. That's the crux here.

It will sell excess PV to the grid.

DIYrich said:

It will sell excess PV to the grid.

Click to expand...

Which setting is actually controlling that?

Shimmy said:

Which setting is actually controlling that?

Click to expand...

Uncheck both "limit power to home" and "limit power to load".
Not mentioned: If PV exceeds load and battery charging, the only place for it to go is to the Grid (sell to grid). It will not limit PV production when on-grid.
Page 36 of the Manual under "Grid Setup", "Charge": "PV will always charge 100%." (regardless of this setting).

Under Time of Use:
4pm-9pm, set "power" to something like 1/2 c, "batt" to something like 10%, uncheck charge, uncheck sell. This will use the battery up to the "power" level until batteries are down to 10%. It will NOT charge the battery from the grid. It will NOT sell power to the Grid.
9pm-4pm, set "batt" to 100%, uncheck charge, uncheck sell. This will NOT use the battery between 9pm-4pm, unless Grid is down. It will NOT charge the battery from the Grid.

Page 37 of the Manual under "Time of Use", "Use the batteries to reduce power consumption from the grid during a user programmable peak pricing time". Power source priority: 1. Solar Panels; 2. Batteries; 3. Grid.

> If PV exceeds load and battery charging, the only place for it to go is to the Grid (sell to grid). It will not limit PV production when on-grid

That's not what I observe. It simply limits the amount of power produced by PV. I have limited-to-home checked, if I uncheck it it will sell excess solar to grid but then it will also sell 500W to the grid from my battery when I don't have an excess, i.e., what I described in the first post. There's a "max sell power" setting, but the Sol-Ark sells the value I enter there _plus_ 500W. I just put 250 in there and I see ~750W being sold:

power: -755,
power_l1: -224,
power_l2: -531,
power_ct: -763,

In effect, the Sol-Ark sells at least 500W to the grid at all times _regardless_ of what's going on unless one of the "limit-to" settings is checked.

tve said:

> If PV exceeds load and battery charging, the only place for it to go is to the Grid (sell to grid). It will not limit PV production when on-grid

That's not what I observe. It simply limits the amount of power produced by PV. I have limited-to-home checked, if I uncheck it it will sell excess solar to grid but then it will also sell 500W to the grid from my battery when I don't have an excess, i.e., what I described in the first post. There's a "max sell power" setting, but the Sol-Ark sells the value I enter there _plus_ 500W. I just put 250 in there and I see ~750W being sold:

power: -755,
power_l1: -224,
power_l2: -531,
power_ct: -763,

In effect, the Sol-Ark sells at least 500W to the grid at all times _regardless_ of what's going on unless one of the "limit-to" settings is checked.

Click to expand...

Post a pic of your Grid Parm / Limiter screen, and Time of Use/ Setup Screen.

I don’t think you should use limited to home mode. That requires getting he CT’s to work properly. If all your loads are on the load output (mine are too) use limited to load mode.

> I don’t think you should use limited to home mode. That requires getting he CT’s to work properly.

My CTs are working properly as you can see from my last post. I have not observed any difference between limited-to-home vs. limited-to-load, as one might expect. The manual is not 100% clear on whether there are any other differences, like power priority.

> Post a pic of your Grid Parm / Limiter screen, and Time of Use/ Setup Screen.

This is what I had this afternoon with grid sell enabled. At that point the Sol-Ark was selling both solar and battery power to the grid:





I then noticed that I can check both "limited-to-load" and "grid sell", so I tried that but it drained 680W from the battery in order to sell 500W to the grid (sun was getting low by then):


I futzed some more with it, also in PowerView where the "limit-to-load" + "grid-sell" is represented differently (there's a toggle called "solar sell" instead of "grid-sell"). I ended up with what looks identical on the LCD but now it's doing the right thing in that it's down to drawing 50W from the grid (which I'm fine with). I will have to dump the modbus registers to see whether there's an actual config difference between what the LCD does and what PowerView does...

As far as I can tell:
- if only "grid sell" is checked the Sol-Ark will sell a minimum of 500W to the grid, even if that comes out of battery, no way to avoid that
- if "grid sell" is unchecked (one of the "limited-to" options must be checked), the Sol-Ark will not sell excess solar to the grid
- if "limit-to-load" and "grid-sell" are checked it seems it doesn't insist on selling 500W minimum and it seems it sells solar back

I will have to see how it behaves this evening once the sun has set and then tomorrow when there's plenty of sun again the validate. This shouldn't be this difficult...

BTW, I find non-obvious that there are 5 modes:
- grid sell
- limit-to-home
- limit-to-home + grid-sell
- limit-to-load
- limit-to-load + grid-sell

The two "+ grid-sell" modes use the "solar sell" toggle in PowerView, which seems to be a better term for it.

Uncheck Grid Sell
Uncheck Limit to Home
Uncheck Limit to Load

Go to the "Basic Setup" screen, "advanced" tab. Check the "auto detect home limit sensors". clik "ok".
It will then check the CT direction, and recalibrate them, and the box will uncheck itself if you go back to it.

Is it still selling battery?
What times were the status screens taken? Then we can tell which TOU time period is in effect.

BTW: just for kics, make the 24:00 time slot something earlier (23:49, 23:45, etc.) In theory it could be confusing 24:00 and 0:00, which are the same times. You probably want the same values in both time slots.

> Uncheck Grid Sell
>Uncheck Limit to Home
>Uncheck Limit to Load

This combination cannot be set.

I did calibrate the CT and it's reporting the right value (checked via modbus registers).

I now seems to be working mostly OK with limited-to-load and grid-sell both checked. It has not sold battery power since my last change (last inline settings image in my previous post). I did sell 500W of solar yesterday when it was also charging the battery and it wasn't because the battery was full or couldn't take the power. I'll continue to monitor.