Ultimate Guide to Tesla's Solar App (2024)

In this video, we're going to do a full Tesla app walkthrough. Whether you have the Tesla Power Wall or their solar inverter, this video is for you. We'll go through all the information that you can find in the app, how to read it, some tips and tricks, and we'll simulate a grid outage and go off-rid during this video while recording. If you have any other questions, leave them below in the comments. And if you got some value from this video, please leave me a like. All right, let's get started.

All right. The first thing you see when you join in on the app's going to be your battery status, whether it's generating, discharging, or in standby mode. Right now, you can see it's discharging, which means the battery is providing power to the house. You can also see your live solar output as well as your home energy consumption. Then you can see your power wall state of charge, which is 100% in this example, and then how much power it's either sending out or receiving. And then if you are receiving or sending any power to the grid, you can also see that information here as well. So, it's really easy to understand.

The Tesla app's fantastic. It's my favorite solar app as far as the main monitoring portals there are with Nphase, Solar Edge, and then Tesla. I mean, not only is the app really cool to look at, but it's also easy to understand, and there's a lot of good information in it. You'll have a few tabs on your home screen. So, you'll have your energy, your impact, and then your settings. You'll also see a go off-rid simulation, and then a support tab. So, on the house right here, you can see a live view of what's going on. And then you can also see some colored lines. The yellow line represents solar energy. The green line represents power wall energy. And any gray lines will represent grid or utility energy. So that'll just give you a really easy visual aid of what's going on with your energy and the energy flow.

Navigating the Tesla Solar App

We'll start here on the energy tab. Um right off the bat on the front page you can see how many kilowatt hours were generated on that day. So it gives you a really easy view. On the bottom you can see some icons. These are basically your energy views where you can see and filter out any specific data. You can see a home view, so your home's energy consumption. If you have a Tesla vehicle, you'll be able to see your vehicle energy stats. Here's all of your power wall information. Here will be all your solar information. And then this will be all of your grid information.

We'll start on the solar tab. Pretty typical solar monitoring. You can toggle off the energy flow on any of these tabs with this little eyeball icon. So, if I go ahead and I click on this, you can see right here, um, it takes away all the colors, which is essentially your energy flow. If we toggle it back on, it'll give you a live view of what happened with the system throughout the day. So, you can just touch the screen and then kind of scroll across and it'll give you a good indication of when the battery was fully charged, which is around 4:15, and then where the system started to export the excess solar generation, and then how much of the energy my home actually consumed in real time. All that will be broken down uh here under the energy flow. You can see of the 62.8 8 kwatt hours I generated my home consumed about 37 kwatt hours. Power wall uh consumed 24.6 and the difference was exported back to the grid which in this case was 1.3 kilwatt hours.

In addition to figuring out your energy flow, you can also filter out the date range. I won't go too far in depth on all the different date ranges in here, but just like a bank statement, you can filter out the date range on any of these energy tabs um to really get into the weeds of all the information. So you can filter it out by month if you'd like. You can filter it out by year. You could filter it out by uh lifetime or a custom date range. So if you want to go back and see a specific range, say maybe I want to see the last 30 days, I can go in adjust that and assign a custom range. And this will give you a breakdown in individual bar graphs, but also um the breakdown of the energy flow. So, like I said, this could work on any of these tabs down here in the bottom if you're trying to get into that information and find it out based on a specific date range or a larger date range. But in this video, I'm just going to stick with the day time scale to make things simple.

Exploring Energy Data and Flow

Let's go into the home consumption tab over here on the far left and see what that energy looks like. On the home tab, it's going to give you a full breakdown of the amount of energy you consumed over that day. It'll also give you five minute intervals of how much power you were pulling at any given time. Um, you can see these spiked lines that represents the AC unit. So, in this case, we're talking about home consumption. It's going to let you know how much power came from the different resources. So, during this particular day, 11% of my power came from the battery, 50% from the solar, and 39% from the grid. After the solar information, I would say the home information is probably the second most important amount of information because it's going to give you the full breakdown of really what your consumption is doing. So, how much power you're consuming, where that power is coming from, and if there's any anomalies or weird things about your consumption habits, that type of information would be pretty obvious here on the chart. Something that seems off with the measurements.

I'm going to skip the vehicle charging area here. If you have a Tesla vehicle, um the whole ecosystem works really well together. on the power wall section. This will let you know how much power you discharged, so sent from the power wall to the house and how much power you actually charged from the solar panels. And it'll give you an idea of when that's happening. So here I could see I was discharging um energy to the house represented by blue and then I started charging it up from solar energy represented by yellow. And then you can see another graph down towards the bottom that says the charge level and you can get a good idea of when your battery was discharged down to your reserve level. and when it was fully charged, at what point throughout the day. So, just for reference, I can see right here my battery was completely discharged at about 7:05 a.m. and then my battery was fully charged, I believe, at about 44 4:15 p.m. So, the same thing goes on the energy flow. You can see a breakdown of where the power you're discharging from the battery is going. So, in this case, all of the power went to the house for home consumption. Um, usually that's going to be the case. your power wall is going to power your house. And then you can also see where it was charged from.

Understanding Home and Powerwall Performance

The last section we'll talk about is the grid. The grid will break down all of the power that you're importing and exporting to and from the grid. Importing means power you're drawing in from the grid. Exporting means excess solar energy you're sending out to the grid, typically from your solar system. So you can see during the evening I was importing some power. That's represented by these blue lines. And all of that energy went to the house. and then towards the tail end of the day I exported a little bit of power from the solar once the battery was charged and then back to consuming from the grid and then at the tail end of the day the vehicle charging kicked on from the grid gives you that full picture of what's going on your imported power your exported power lets you know your net grid usage the difference between the two and then the same energy flow all right and that covers everything on the energy section again if for any reason you can't see the colors on the graph. Just make sure that eyeball is toggled on so that way you can see all the colorcoded uh breakdown of the energy flow.

All right, next let's dive into the impact tab. It'll give you a quick breakdown of how much of your power was self-powered today. So 35% of my power came from my solar or my battery. Let's dive into the breakdown here. Again, up into the top right, you can change all the time scales on this setting. We're going to leave it at a year just because the information that it covers in here um is a little bit more zoomed out. It's going to cover your self-powered ratios, time of use ratios, overall savings, um things like that. So, first thing you'll see your self-powered ratio. It's going to let you know what percent of the power you've consumed came from what resource. So, 29% of my power comes from solar, 21% from the battery, and 50% from the grid. In my example, it's mainly because I charge my electric vehicle strictly from the grid. I don't use my solar or my battery in almost all cases. So, in that example right there, I'm going to have a pretty high level of grid dependence.

Analyzing Your Energy Impact and Savings

Where it breaks down a level further is is showing you the time of use breakdown. So, it'll have your peak energy consumption and then your off- peak energy consumption. On your peak energy consumption, you want a very low grid dependence. So, we don't want to see a high percent of grid usage here. So, this lets me know, hey, during peak hours, 47% of my power comes from solar, 26% from the battery, and 27% from the grid. Those are pretty good ratios. Off peak, it's a little bit different. Now, my off- peak hours are in the evening time. So, I had no solar power consumed during off- peak hours because there was no sunlight. 10% of my power came from the battery system and then bulk majority came from the grid at 90%. And that pretty much is vehicle charging for the most part.

It'll also let you know your energy value and your overall cost savings. So you can see here for the year I've saved about $1,300. So a little under $200 a month. And it'll give you a good visual of that. It will also break down your solar offset. So the amount of energy you've produced throughout the year and the amount of energy you've consumed throughout the year. So you can see I've produced about 70% of what I've consumed. So, my solar's produced 11,356 kilwatt hours and my home has consumed 16,362 kilwatt hours. And then at the very bottom, it will give you a backup history. It'll let you know all the grid outages that have occurred and how long they occurred for.

Back on your home screen, we'll dive into the settings section. Under the power wall section, it'll give you some details specific to the battery. First, it's going to have you set your backup reserve. I recommend somewhere between 10 and 30%. If you're trying to maximize the overall amount of energy your battery uses each and every day, I would recommend setting it a little bit lower. If you're more concerned with power outages and you don't want to get caught with too low of a percent, maybe set it a little bit higher, but you can mess around with it and kind of figure out what works best for you.

Configuring Powerwall and System Settings

Operational mode. This is simple. If you're in a utility that has a time of use rate structure, off- peak and on- peak rates, pick a timebased control and then set up your utility rate plan. Some utility rate plans are already set in there in Tesla's database. Some utilities you have to enter in all of the on- peak off- peak rates. It's kind of confusing. I'm going to create a separate video on that. If you're in a utility that has a flat rate for their power, there's no timebased rate structure. They charge the same amount for energy throughout the day, throughout the year. I would select self-powered mode. So that's the difference between the two options right here. Tesla gives you kind of a quick breakdown of it. But in most cases, timebased control is going to save you the most amount of money.

Advanced options. If you have PTO from your utility, make sure permission to export is toggled on. So that way your system operates at full capacity. And then grid charging. If grid charging is allowed in your area, it's your call if you want to toggle it on or off. I don't have that option. If you're in a utility that has some sort of rate structure where it makes sense to charge from the grid and then use that power during on- peak and you're able to do so, it might make sense. I would just consult your solar company on what the best option is for you. If you're in Arizona, it typically doesn't make sense and it's not allowed by most utility providers. So, that covers everything on the Power Wall settings.

Vehicle charging I'm not going to dive into. If you have a Tesla vehicle, that whole ecosystem works well together. In storm watch mode, I would recommend having that enabled. Um, basically if there's any sort of weather alert that gets sent out that may lead to a grid outage and your batteries are a little bit low in charge, it'll actually use the grid to top off your batteries. So that way if there were a power outage, you would have a higher capacity or even full charge on your batteries to last the duration of an outage. It's a nice feature to have. The only disclaimer I would say is if you're in a utility that has really expensive cost of energy during on- peak or a demand charge like we see in Arizona. I would be really careful of this just because if you have a storm watch occur during on- peak hours and you're pulling a bunch of power from the grid into your battery, it could be a little expensive to charge the battery during that time depending on the cost of energy.

Advanced Features and Preferences

Utility rate plan. This is another section where you'll input your specific utilities rate if it's not in Tesla's database. Wi-Fi. Uh, self-explanatory. You set up your Wi-Fi there. Manage access. You can share access to your Tesla app to another user. And then my home info. Um, just going to have your address and site information, things like that.

All right. Now, we're going to go through and simulate a grid outage. You just want to go ahead and click go off grid. And then at that point, it's going to give you a second prompt. So, it's hard to do accidentally, but we'll simulate it live right here. um where you guys won't see any interruption with lights, uh Wi-Fi, cameras, electronics. It's an automatic transfer process. So, realistically, you actually don't know your house went off grid, but you will get a notification sent to you from the Tesla app letting you know, hey, there's been a grid outage. And then once everything gets set up, it'll give you an idea how long they project the batteries to last.

So, you can see right here at the top left, off-rid, it'll give you your state of charge. So, it'll give you a projection based on your current draw rate. Right now, I'm pulling 3.7 kilowatts, which is pretty high. That's with the AC on. There's really not a lot of conservation going on here. Um, if this was a true grid outage, I would throttle that back. I would turn electronics off and be much more conservative. And if that were the case and your draw rate decreases, the app would forecast more duration out of your battery system. So, projecting 6 and a half backup hours remaining, which in most cases is more than enough for a typical outage. But if I was concerned that it was going to be a long outage, you can go in, turn off your AC units, turn down your AC units, get the electronics offline, everything like that.

So, I went ahead and turned off my AC unit and dropped my home consumption down to under a kilowatt. We're at 7 kW, 700 watts. It's forecasting now that I have 7.7 backup hours remaining. And it's going to constantly keep adjusting this number based on your draw rate, how much electricity you're using, but ultimately it's just an estimate. If it's an actual power outage, once the grid comes back online, everything will act normal again. If you are simulating a grid outage in the app, go ahead, click reconnect to grid. It'll give you a prompt letting you know it may take a couple minutes. We'll reconnect to the grid. Cool. And we are back online.

Simulating and Managing Grid Outages

I appreciate you guys watching. If you did enjoy the video, please leave me a like. If you want to see anything else in the Tesla app or you have a question, go ahead and drop them in the comments below. Thank you for watching and we'll see you next time.

Tesla App Features and Technical Details

Frequently Asked Questions

How can I monitor my tesla solar energy system and Powerwall using the Tesla app?

The Tesla app provides a comprehensive overview of your system. On the main screen, you can see your battery status (generating, discharging, or in standby), live solar output, home energy consumption, Powerwall state of charge, and any power being sent to or received from the grid. The app also uses colored lines—yellow for solar energy, green for Powerwall energy, and gray for grid/utility energy—to give you a visual aid of the energy flow.

What are the different operational modes for my tesla solar energy Powerwall, and which one should I choose?

The Tesla app offers two main operational modes for your Powerwall: "Time-based Control" and "Self-Powered Mode." If your utility has a time of use (TOU) rate structure with off-peak and on-peak rates, "Time-based Control" is generally recommended to maximize savings. If your utility charges a flat rate for power throughout the day and year, then "Self-Powered Mode" is the appropriate choice. Tesla typically provides a quick breakdown of these options in the app.

How does the Tesla app help prepare for and manage grid outages with tesla solar energy?

The Tesla app has a "Storm Watch" mode that, when enabled, will use the grid to top off your batteries if a weather alert is issued that may lead to a grid outage, ensuring you have a higher or full charge. In the event of an actual or simulated grid outage, the app provides a "Go Off-Grid" feature. Once off-grid, it displays your Powerwall's state of charge and projects how long the batteries are estimated to last based on your current energy consumption, allowing you to adjust usage to extend backup duration.