This 7kw PV and All in One battery is my second installation, I have had an Australian Selectronic SP Pro at a country property for more than 10 years. It uses a 48v LiFePO4 battery bank and it pretty much does what ECO mode but with greater control.
Peak tariffs here are from 3pm to 9pm and I want to set up the All-in-one to charge the battery from the grid in the hours before 3pm to give me enough energy to last that six hours. I can see 10 sets of charge controls but do these override ECO mode?
There is another issue which may be specific to where I live in Melbourne. All grid connected PV sites have to be capable of having their export energy curtailed through a command issued over the Internet by the power distribution company. I have Enphase iq8 micro inverters and an Enphase gateway. This seems to control the level of export. The problem is that it uses the export limit as a generation limit and if the export limit is set to zero for any reason then my PV stops generating and I cannot charge my batteries. I think this is a fault in the Enphase software but I cannot get a straight answer from them. So a warning.
Answering your first question, yes, the charge slots override Eco mode. Set Eco mode on so your AIO will meet house load, then set however many charge slots you want - during the charge slots any excess solar will charge the batteries as will the batteries charge from the grid.
Regarding the Enphase micro inverters and grid control, we don’t have exactly the same in the UK, but our grid operator can define a maximum power output that the home system can provide (at any time).
I think what you are seeing may well be just a limitation of having an AC coupled inverter (the micro inverters). They don’t know that your solar generation can be charged to the battery and not exported and so when they get the command to shutoff, that’s what they do. With a hybrid inverter (which is what I have), as its all in one box, the inverter can still let the batteries charge whilst restricting AC export output.
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Thank you Geoffrey, that is what I suspected. My installer has specified a combination of equipment which is incompatible with the new (October 2024) arrangement for grid managers to restrict rooftop generation on command. This is something which Enphase has to fix for our market or lose the business with AC coupled batteries.
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You would think that if the Enphase system had a CT clamp around your grid supply it could act upon that to decide whether to shutoff the inverters in conjunction with the network operator command, or it could let the inverters continue operating as any generated AC is either being charged into the battery or consumed by the house
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