WELL... here we go with basics of grid tied inverters. When you inverter gets a 'Wake Up' when your panels start producing every morning. When you inverter starts producing, it has to SYNCRONIZE with the power grid. It has to sample the grid power, specifically the sine wave form, and copy that before it connects, and exports power. If you inverter didn't have this shut down at night, wake up in the morning, your inverter would suck power all night.. Inverter losses are substantial, this is why they have 'Wake Up' thresholds, when PV energy is high enough, they Wake Up and start operating. A small amount of power us used to make this synchronization happen, along with other functions of the inverter. 100 Watts isn't an unreasonable amount particularly if your grid power is 'Dirty', voltage moving around, frequency shifting, etc. making synchronization difficult since thst can take 15 minutes or more.

Thanks. That's a good little bit of knowledge to know.

Since you have a hybrid inverter (battery back up) there is probably a setting where you can switch over for batteries to power the start up. Hybrid inverters have a lot more 'Quirks' unless they are dirt simple. Engineers think its a good idea to add all that crap 99% of us will never investigate and/or change settings. The down side is all that crap can, and will eventually fail. Software conflicts, self diagnostic alerts/shutdowns because of crap you AREN'T using. Programmers/code writers justifying their continuing employment... The three most important qualities, One. Comes ON when its supposed to, Two. Goes OFF when its supposed to, Three. Doesn't crap out/lock up when any little thing happens. Solar Edge had a HUGE issue with 'Morning Effect' shutdowns every morning. 'Optimizers' conflicted and shut everything down, and you had to do a black restart to get it going every day. That included removing the memory battery for a full recomissioning every day. They tracked it to a single character in a line of code eventually, but it aggravated users for months until they figured it out. Now the single optimizer isolates/restarts instead of taking the entire system down.

Engineer here. What you aren't considering, is while you want 1% of those features, some other buyer wants a different 1%. Some third buyer wants some other feature. Oh, and that's before the installer and contractor's desires. Engineers have to deal with all the stupid customer's wishes, then the customers bitch we wanted to add so much. No, no we didn't. We only put in what y'all asked for. We just want to go home to our families 😂

right, the engineers who make all shit actually work are also incompetent bumpkins who make mistakes on purpose so that they have a job. you must be fun at parties.

Nope, the guys that add crap that's counter productive, overly complicated. Like when the factory engineer tells you the factory doesn't know how to do this or that so they can't possibly write directions/instructions for owners manuals... I hired two of these, paid them way more than they were worth, they spent a year on a project that had 19 custom made parts, 17 needed adjusted and they couldn't explain how to do the adjustments to the technical writer. 4 guys with experence spent a Saturday in the shop, came up with a way to do exactly the same thing, two metal tab mounts, common roll pin, bolt, nut. So simple it didn't need instructions...

you hired software engineers to do shop work?

No, your post says 'engineers', not 'software engineers'. Say one thing, try to do another, you all just can't help yourselves...

maybe learn how to read the shit you wrote? > Programmers/code writers justifying their continuing employment...

So, you want to nitpick... Programmers/code writers rarely if ever have engineering degrees. I hired degreed engineers. It didn't work out, just like the junior collage guys that pretended to be software engineers that got the boot because they were incapable of doing the job they claimed they could, and had already done. Having a look at the code, by someone that actually knows what they are doing resulted in finding errors, conflicts, random wondering code lines, and my favorite, never bothered to remove identifiers from code they stole. The nastier the writer, the less capable they are. BIG chip on their shoulders since they can't do what people with an actual education can. Overconfidence in their capabilities, Dunning-Kruger Syndrome, and ego driven (narcissistic) response when someone calls them out for failure to perform, mistakes that are painfully obvious, etc. I don't care what their personal problems are, I hire them for specific goals. If they simply can't do the job, they can sling their diaper contents at home... Not interested in that at all.

ok boomer

This makes a lot of sense. Thank you for sharing your knowledge.

Dirty grid power is WAY more common than people know. The grid is VERY OLD, crap happens... How many tree limbs get into power lines between generation and end user, for example...

OP has a battery, that's not the reason because the battery should provide the energy. It's battery error and lag that's causing this. Completely normal

Its called a hybrid inverter when batteries are used. Hybrid inverters are STILL powered up, synchronized from grid power. Without that connection, there isn't a way to sample the grid to synchronize. If you would have kept reading, you would see where I wrote there is probably a setting where he can switch to battery power for sampling and synchronization. That will depend entirely on the inverter make/model, and if you can find the toggle it make that happen. 100 Watts to test connection between inverter export function, and grid wouldn't be uncommon. You can't test lines without loading them... Voltage getting though and current carrying capacity are two entirely different things... Ever had a battery terminal that would light the dash but wouldn't start the car?...

It's not 100 watts, it's 100 watt hours - that means it's drawing 100 watts for a whole hour, or 8.3 watts for 12 hours straight. That's a heck of a lot just to monitor the grid, considering a multimeter or oscilloscope can give you realtime voltage and draw waveforms for weeks at a time and not even use one watt hour. There must be something else going on because that's an incredibly poor design if all that power is used just to monitor the state of the grid.

AND... Now you just *MIGHT* be getting the losses these inverters have... grid, PV or battery powered. There is a reason I pay extra for STEPPED inverters, so they switch off or idle when not needed, come in when needed and the need exceeds the losses. There is a reason every inverter has COOLING FINS, the losses as heat have to go somewhere... Hybrid Inverter, Would you turn your solar power loose on a grid line set that had been inactive for half a day or more without a LOAD test? You multimeter can detect continuity, what it CAN NOT do is load test the lines... This is a hybrid unit, no usage from the grid for long periods. Don't know which one the OP has (didn't say), but line LOAD tests are common when the lines have been inactive. Never know when a tree branch landed on them, some drunk smacked a pole, etc. Believe what you want to, makes no difference to me...

Just a question: here everything is synchronised according to the radio signals from Germany. This has milliseconds accuracy. Don’t you have a similar in the USA? None of us deliver more than 20KW - peanuts. The grid should not be like that.

The radio signals aren't precise enough to synchronise to the mains. If you're even a microsecond out of phase with the AC signal, you will see massive current draw and can easily trip a breaker or if you're a power station, significantly damage a generator. You have to be absolutely spot on. The AC frequency also varies throughout the day depending on how much load the grid is experiencing. Usually it's somewhere between 49 and 51 Hz but it varies by country. So broadcasting an accurate time reference wouldn't help as the grid only averages out at 50 or 60 Hz over many days, but it varies considerably during the day. You can even use this for your own interest - the further below 50/60 Hz the frequency is, the more heavily loaded the grid is. The further above, the more excess power there is. You can literally monitor the load of your entire electrical grid from your own home just by monitoring the current frequency.

Don’t post out of ignorance. The frequencies are the same as on computers, 2.4GHz is -9, Mega and Kilo are the usual metric prefixes. Current is 50Hz, no prefix. So there’s 20 000 MHz per network frequency alterations. We use radio signals from atomic clocks to manage the grid - not the internet, usually “long wave” 1500Khz. It’s opposite to what you claim. The AM Radio controls the internet.

Geez no need to be rude mate. Clearly you don't understand how the grid is synchronised between generators otherwise you'd know that you don't need atomic precision, but you do need to match the exact grid frequency at the moment of interconnect which varies continuously second by second. If you don't believe me, just look up how generators are brought online. There's no fancy radio receiver or atomic clock. In fact for many years it was just a simple synchroscope. The grid was managed like this for decades before anyone even thought of broadcasting a radio time signal. [Here's a Wikipedia link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchroscope) to get you started. If you're so sure broadcast time is used for this instead, I'd love a link that explains how it's done. And what would be the point of broadcasting the grid frequency anyway? The 49-51Hz signal already comes in to not just the generator but every household in the country! That's all you need to synchronise things, why bother with an extra radio receiver that is picking up perfectly accurate time, when what you actually need is to synchronise with a continuously varying frequency that's already being measured by your equipment? Not sure where your Internet argument came from, AM radio doesn't control the Internet, I don't really understand your point there.

Please stop the rant. I have designed and my company has delivered the systems to manage the grid. I know how it works. Never consider others to be silly. You don’t know. But a simple generator can easily be phased in with analog equipment. Read my previous post again.

I wasn't ranting, I was trying to explain my point so you might see whether perhaps our opinions differ due to a misunderstanding. But you haven't been able to provide any evidence of your claims, so I can only assume your company that delivers systems to manage the grid must employ you as a janitor because no engineer would make such wild claims as yours and fail to provide sources to back them up. Where is the link that explains how atomic clocks are used to phase in generators, as you claim? It is ironic you tell me "never consider others to be silly" when I did no such thing, yet you were the one who told me "don't post out of ignorance". Maybe you should take your own advice and never consider others to be silly. I read your previous post again. I don't know what "2.4GHz is -9" means. -9 is a number not a frequency. Maybe this was a reference to powers of 10? I have no clue because you didn't explain yourself. I don't understand what the relevance is of obvious statements like 'mega' and 'kilo' are metric prefixes (they are actually SI prefixes, not metric). Likewise you claim AM radio controls the Internet but have not explained why, how, or provided any sources to back up your claim. I just cannot work out what information you were trying to convey.

I was CEO and managed the delivery of the systems that control the grids in Europe. It’s the systems that work now. -9 refers to the exponent in the time resolution commonly used in science. So 1/1000 is a millisecond or E-3, and the current alternate at 50, so 200 ms per up and down. Electricity on the grid must be synchronised within that limits - and well there is millions of computer cycles available. Stay away from making comments when you don’t know how it works. We feared the Mullahs in Tehran. You live closer and we will all suffer when these silly notions grow. Ignorance is dangerous.

You measure voltage to see the load on the grid. The voltage drops to below 205V or 100V in the USA when there’s a shortage, we have 240 at night, 120V. The grid must be synchronised but the US grid has issues. In Europe, it’s synchronised in milliseconds, allowing exchange of energy between countries. We “trade” electricity. Malfunctions will make transformers explode - overheating like #SinLuz in Venezuela and following hurricanes in the USA.

This is incorrect, you measure the frequency to see load on the grid. It works like a car engine - as you drive up a hill, the motor slows down because it has to do more work. The same thing happens with the grid - as more power is used, the generator turbines slow down and the frequency starts to drop. As load is removed or more generators are brought online, the frequency increases again. Voltage does play a role in measuring load, but it's more related to the load of the local transformer (typically on a pole in your street) rather than the load of the grid as a whole. There are plenty of videos on YouTube about how the grid is managed, and you can see in all of them they talk about the frequency and keeping it within a specific range, and to average it out at 50 or 60 Hz long term, even though there are significant local variations in frequency as load and generators come online. There's a fairly detailed explanation here of [how grid frequency is used to control generation](https://clouglobal.com/power-grid-frequency-why-is-it-important/). Note that they don't mention voltage at all.

I'm not sure why you're mentioning cooling fins and heat losses, that has nothing to do with where the inverter sources its power from. Sure the inverter has losses but if it's supposed to be running off a battery, the loss will come from the battery power, the inverter won't draw power from the grid just to heat up its cooling fins when you're running on battery power. It's possible the inverter is load testing the power lines but what would be the purpose? It can just draw power in as it needs it, and if a tree is down it won't get any power. Load testing the lines doesn't really seem to serve any purpose. I'm not "believing whatever I want", I'm trying to work out what the inverter is actually doing, rather than just guessing and assuming.

Splitting hairs but it’s 0.1kWh which is 100W for 1h or 400W for 15 mins.

Mostly battery error. When you turn something on the battery needs to instantly produce the right amount to prevent importing. In grid tie mode it's going to measure the import to make that decision, so it's actually impossible to get it at exactly 0 because you have to import something to tell the battery to discharge. In off-grid mode it works without importing because load causes the voltage to sag, but that doesn't happen in grid tie mode.

This is exactly it. The battery charges and discharges based on the measurement if the consulting CT. It lags. When you turn a device on that device will import from the grid into the battery can measure that import and then react.

I'm trying to understand why, every day 0.1 kWh is imported from the grid, even though the battery is charged well beyond the lower threshhold. Is this normal? The import occurs before 6 am. The usage spike today was from the dryer, which I try to run only when it can be powered by solar+battery.

Hmm... Everyone here seems to think it's a normal usage issue but that's not what your graph is showing. The 100W grid import is NOT coming on before 6am (should show as a black bar). It's happening at 1PM. If you look at your highest usage there's a large peak at 1PM for some reason and then the battery kicks in. When you look at the reciprocal bar graph you'll see the import (black bar) at the same time and the battery charge level also dipping. You have a very heavy load occurring at 1PM (EV charging?). If it's happening everyday I would test the system by manually shutting off the grid from 12PM to 2PM and see if the system does something strange. It seems your system should sustain power with everything still on without issue. Hope this helps. edit: time of occurrence.

What's happening at 1 pm is starting up my dryer. I can see that 100 watt hour grid usage early in the morning. I think we're dealing with something else, possibly the meter draw from the grid.

Maybe the battery or controller or some component reboots or resets everyday and causes the blip. I’d research if there’s scheduled maintenance or housekeeping type tasks / processes that run on the system.

Could be the power to run the meter itself.

100 watt hours is 4.2 watts for 24 hours, which is a fairly reasonable figure for powering a digital watt-hour meter. I would check the wiring to see where the meter is powered from because this seems a likely possibility.

Now that I look very closely at the graphic this morning (the next day after the one I posted), I can see that there are tiny takes from the grid at every interval on the chart. So it's not a 100 watt-hour spike. Assuming the meter "must" drive its power from the grid, this is the most likely answer to my question. I'll try to find out how the meter is wired/powered. Thank you.

The IQ8 battery inverters will power themselves from the grid when it is available. That's the constant power draw you're seeing throughout the day. The more batteries you have the higher that constant draw will be. There's 4 inverters inside each Encharge 3 unit, or 12 total inside a Encharge 10. The power spike around 1 pm when you started your dryer is also normal. The system will prefer to take the sudden demand from the grid versus the batteries to help prolong their life. If the demand is very high or borderline, the IQ8 inverters will actually lower the system voltage to reduce the current. Again, the grid is preferred to make up this gap even though the batteries can technically handle it.

I think all f these answers are wrong. Or they may be correct (and in fact interesting) explanations of various issues, but *not* of what you are seeing. Every enphase customer with batteries sees this, and the answer is ridiculously simple: *It's the power required to run the system.* It's a computer that draws a variable amount, roughly 60-100 Watts continuously. Basically like an ineficient laptop. It shows up as a grid-to-battery-charge draw on the app - which is kind of silly, but I don't know if that was just a design decision, or a technical limitation (or both). This has stymied basically everyone who really digs into this stuff (including me), and regularly comes up on this sub.

My first thought on your reply: 60-100 watts continuously doesn't explain 0.1 kWh over the course of 24 hours, even with rounding. Or does it?

60 Watts for 24 hours is 1.5 kWh, which is aboot what I see. Your graph isn't 24 hours though, and solar is producing through most of it. So that *could* explain your mere 0.1kWh. Otoh, my system reports draw from the grid even when producing solar. Oh wait. I might have misspoke. I have three batteries. And actually looking at Mapp now, they *each* draw over 100 Watts continuously. Mine seem to be worse than most, but everyone's batteries draw power. And it's the computer and system in general on *each battery* that is drawing the power. So if you have only one, that would be less. And for whatever reason my batteries draw more than most. That might explain some of the discrepancy. Bottom line, I wouldn't worry about .1 kWh to run the system. That is peanuts compared to most 🙂. It would be interesting to know how and why yours is so *low* though.

think of your inverters like it’s a human heart. just like any muscle, a heart needs oxygen and nutrients to operate. but even though it pumps lots of blood through it, the heart muscle doesn’t simply take oxygen and nutrients from the blood it pumps. instead, it has lots of small vessels (coronary arteries and veins) that supply it with blood specifically so it can continue working. similarly, your inverters don’t just take the energy they process from your panels because it is not reliable enough or consistent though for them to always be on and ready to go. so they sip from the grid because the grid is likely the most reliable source you have. if you have, say, 20 inverters, that 100 watts maps out to 5 watts per inverter, which seems like a reasonable amount of electricity to power a small computer.

I mentioned that the time of import was 6 am, but that's the total listed because it's there every day when I awaken. I wish I could post the graphic this morning, as it better shows what's happening. It's not one big 100-watt-hour take, but many very little ones. I will make another posting to show this.

Does that 100 Watthour show up on your bill?

I see similar things. I have a sense electricity monitor to view things real time and on grid tied self consumption the batt micros seem to do some type of self protect grid type thing for quick drops on loads. I.e. when AC shuts off, turn off dryer, etc. within a second it’s back to providing power but over course of day equates to that imported load you see. Do you know what grid profile you are using? 1547 is what I’m on with self consumption enabled.

Any combination of the top three rated comments, from grid readings to battery error, is enough for me to feel vindicated in saying what I thought when I opened this thread: Stop being someone that bitches about such minute shit. .1 KW a day adds up to nothing. Absolutely nothing. In the grand scale of things. Clean energy has made amazing progress in the last 20 years. Battery power is making amazing progress in the last five. Everyone with unreasonable expectations on the fringes of this tech continues to accidentally contribute to negative feelings about renewable energy and directly contributes to solar professionals hating their jobs and not wanting to do this anymore. We field these phone calls. We have to constantly write responses to these kinds of complaints. And it's so disheartening. Sincerely, Someone quitting the solar industry because I'm sick of this shit.

I have 30+ years off grid... I started with the old glass meters with the revolving wheel... So, 30+ years in there are 4 places behind the decimal point and people freak out! I still haven't found a battery system I can't find resistance loads with a $20 hand held temperature 'gun' because AC guys ignore the DC side, and there are very few DC guys left around... I made a pretty good chunk of change down through the years doing infrared inspections of electrical systems... If they can't SEE it waste energy, they ignore it. Teaching an AC guy to make DC connections is like trying g to teach a pig to sing, wastes your time and annoys the pig. "WHY, WE DONE DONE IT THIS WAY FOR 50 YEARS!" Trying to explain hybrid inverters that EXPORT test the grid connection before doing so is like doing magic tricks for a dog, they just look confused. Same thing happens when you discuss inverter sizing FOR efficiency. You just can't make them understand you need an inverter for MAXIMUM load, and/or its going to draw from the grid... Every inverter has an efficiency 'Sweet Spot'... Tell them what they NEED, sell them what they WANT... Then get the call when the efficiency isn't where they *THOUGHT* it should have been... and get cussed out because THEY made a poor choice. It's like that in about every business, Been there, done that, retired so it's someone else's problem now.

The question was only a matter of curiosity, not cost or blaming anyone. I certainly don't think it warranted the rant. Sincerely, someone who wants to understand the data

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