News & Changelog

We've added a new Hold battery for charging widget to the Site Live view. Use Battery Hold when you want to charge your EV (or any large load) to avoid draining your Powerwall battery.

Nitty Gritty Details

When you are optimizing your Time Of Use / Solar interaction you often want to charge your EV during the day to soak up that free sun, but often your solar panels can't do it all. You need some help, and by default that help usually comes from your battery. But you'd rather keep your battery filled to support your home when the sun goes down. A battery hold is just want you need to keep your battery where it's at. With extra power coming from the grid. This makes the most sense when you have a surplus of overproduction which you'll know by looking at the Load Timing feature we recently added.

User Experience

You get there from the live data chip at the top of the site view — the new card sits next to Load Timing.

Tap Hold battery and we park your backup reserve at its current level. While the hold is active, your load pulls from solar and the grid instead of discharging the battery.

When Does the Hold Stop?

When you start a hold, you pick how it should stop:

• Auto-detect — we watch your load and restore your previous reserve as soon as charging ends. Best for EVs.
• Fixed duration — set a timer (2/4/6/8 hours, or custom) for a strict window.

There's also an 8-hour safety backstop so a missed signal can never leave your reserve parked overnight, and you can always hit Restore now to end a hold early.

How does Auto-detect Know When To Stop?

We use something called Non-Intrusive Load Detection (NILM) to detect the shape of loads. While your battery hold is running we check every so often to see if our NILM detector has noticed that your load is finished. We are re-using the same detector we created for site usage history load detection.

Handy QR Code

Each site has a QR code (on the widget itself and on the Site Settings page) that deep-links straight to Start a Battery Hold Stick it on the wall next to your EV charger and you can start a hold right from your phone.

Feedback

As always let us know what you think. Hit us up on the discord if you have any questions.

Load Timing

We've added a new Site Live Details view which has a new widget on it called Load Timing. The goal here is to answer the question: Can I charge my car? Or replace car with any other large electrical job you wish to do:

• dry clothes
• heat water
• cook dinner
• run the hot tub

You get there by clicking on the live data chip at the top of the site view.

Trmnl

Trmnl support for this new widget is also in place. Go to your trmnl configuration. Site -> Settings -> Manage Trmnl -> Configure

Turning on this new Trmnl widget shows you at a glance when is the best time to do big things.

As always let us know what you think. Hit us up on the discord if you have any questions.

We moved a lot of data access code around to reduce our database egress as we went over our hosting providers's level for their free tier. The data backing Trmnl views and monthly estimated bills is now aggregated at the database level and not at the server. This significantly reduces the data being extracted from the database. You should not see any real effects. If you do ping us on Discord.

Site wide we have reworked how things look and have moved toward making building blocks of the site reusable across different pages. This is still a work in progress.

Live Data

One fresh change is the page header how has more context around the recent flow of energy for your site.

✨ We've added sparklines. ✨

How we render information to Trmnl has been completely overhauled and the Trmnl view has been broken up into components. Each component can be added or removed from a screen you configure.

Trmnl Screen Management

The new Trmnl plugin management UI supports configuring up to 3 screens. The screens will be rotated, like a carousel, with each refresh of your Trmnl device. You can control the order of screens by dragging them to re-arrange them as you like.

To try out this new Trmnl configuration experience, go to your site settings tab -> Manage Trmnl Plugin -> Connect with Powerwall Energy Usage

New Battery Level Component

We recently started tracking history for your battery’s state of charge. This improvement allows us to chart your battery’s charge level during the day. Here is a screen showing energy usage along with battery charge level.

Because the battery charge level uses a lot of vertical space we also added a “glyph version” which just shows battery level indicators when significant changes occur.

As always let us know what you think.

This release brings charting of your energy usage to the Trmnl device.

• We reworked how trmnl markup is created in attempts to make device updates faster.

So what do you think? Please give us feedback on the Discord. We'd love to hear from you.

• Added a Link to our Discord in the site footer. Please come say hi and let us know if you have any concerns or questions.
• Updated the Trmnl device view with cleaner use of the Trmnl markup framework. We'd love your feedback on the ^ Discord ^
• Trmnl plugin setup and site config authentication workflow has been updated and is hopefully smoother.
• We now have better administration support for our users.

We've just deployed some improvements to enhance your energy monitoring experience:

• Site Site navigation has been simplified.
• Interactive Charts: The site page charting is not more granular with 5 minute intervals.
• Load Detection and Tagging: This experimental feature will allow you to tag your electrical loads. The load detector will automatically tag loads near cheaper tariff boundaries with the tag Arbitrage Candidate.

• About: There is a handy About page that explains why this app exists.
• News We added a site news feed feed for important announcements and updates. We also have a Discord Server you can join.

We would love to hear feedback from you about these changes, and any other suggestions you may have. You can reach us on the Discord Server