Quick write-up on tuning a Deye inverter to actually hit zero grid draw during a retailer’s free/bonus period – useful if you’re on GloBird ZeroHero or a similar plan.
We got solar a few years ago, and recently a house battery. We also switched providers to GloBird ZeroHero, hoping to take best advantage of our battery.
With ZeroHero, if you don’t use any electricity from the grid between 6pm and 9pm, you get a bonus. Our battery was typically full at this time, so that should work fine.
In practice, we were still taking small amounts of power from the grid during this time. This is because, I think, it can take a few seconds/milliseconds to ramp up power from the battery, and so it uses the grid also.
I tried to get our solar installer to help, but they were useless. I left a review on SolarQuotes.
I contacted Deye support (via WhatsApp), and they were super responsive. I tweaked my config a few times, but it’s now working fairly well.
Solution
- Disable Deye CoPilot, and enable Time of Use. (I disabled CoPilot via the Android App, but most other config is in the WebApp).
- Define schedules as follows. Charge from grid during free period (mine is 11am-2pm). Sell during ZeroHero period.
We sell during this period not to specifically sell, but so our outgoing compensates for the unwanted incoming. But, we want to limit the sold amount so we don’t run out of battery in the middle of the night.
Under “Grid Setting – Basic”, we can limit the export power. Mine defaulted to 1kW, but I’ve now reduced it to 500W.
Results
In the evening period, you can see we have a small amount of outgoing grid (purple line).
Future
This is working well, but I may tweak it further. For example, I could limit Grid to an even smaller number (e.g. 100W), and sell for a longer period each day, or even all day/night. This will reduce the (already small) amount of incoming grid power (outside the free period).