Recommendations for Power Cut

[liambresnahan]

Hi All,

I’m pretty new to predbat and still learning so perhaps I missed this but I wondered if anyone has any best practices / recommendations for power cut/off grid scenarios? There are obviously a few possibilities inside of this too (i.e. if predbat can correctly control the inverter) but I wondered if anyone had any thoughts on this?

Cheers,
Liam

[gcoan]

You can use the weather alerting to configure predbat to reserve power in the event of forecast bad weather https://springfall2008.github.io/batpred/apps-yaml/#weather-alert-system

Or to set a manual min SoC level to keep in the battery for a power cut, use input_number.predbat_set_reserve_min https://springfall2008.github.io/batpred/customisation/#inverter-control-options

[liambresnahan]

Got it. Thanks for the pointer! The first implies a relative amount of faith on the correct alerting (and the fault path to get to the service) right?

The other question that's related here is - what happens if Predbat can't reach the inverter? I know this is manufacturer-specific, but I wondered if there was a list of known steps inverters go through if the control surface isn't seen for some time?

[gcoan]

You can customise what the weather alert looks for, so I have mine set to extreme weather severity and not all the weather types either.

I'm not sure that there is an answer for your second question. If you know there is going to be a power cut then you can use the predbat settings to prepare that predbat holds back some power in the battery.
But being able to use that power depends on whether your inverter is wired into the house to provide an emergency power supply to the house.

Some inverters can do that natively, some require a gateway to do so.

Predbat would need to be running on something that is connected to the emergency supply, either the home backup or a UPS. And also of course any wifi or network switches that predbat needs to communicate to the inverter.

If predbat can't communicate to the inverter then what happens next is inverter specific really. Some inverters will switch to backup mode automatically. Otherwise will carry on the last command they were instructed to do.

[liambresnahan]

Thanks very much @gcoan.

Would you mind sharing your weather alert config, I’d really like to see the types you have configured, if possible?

[gcoan]

here you go:

  alerts:
    url: "https://feeds.meteoalarm.org/feeds/meteoalarm-legacy-atom-united-kingdom"
    event: "(Red).*(Wind|Snow|Thunderstorm|Storm|Tornado)"
    certainty: "Likely|Expected"
    severity: "Severe|Extreme"
    keep: 30

[liambresnahan]

Thanks so much!!