The Time of Use settings on the Sol Ark is super convoluted and complex, and can only be fully understood after trying it out yourself and seeing what it does. Hence, it deserves its own article.
The BMS interferes with this as well because if the inverter cannot communicate with the battery, you will have to deal with battery voltages instead of specifying battery % within the TOU, and everywhere else. Even if you do this, HAB support recommends you use the voltage settings instead of the % settings.
So, I ended up using the voltage settings, calculating the voltage equivalent of my HAB’s battery % using ChatGPT (of course verifying that the result makes sense — and not blindly believing ChatGPT either).
All the information given here is as per my experience at the time of this writing. Note that hardware, software, electronics & documentation changes over time (100% validated because the older manuals say different things). Use this at your own risk! I would always use the quick, friendly and fast support people at Sol Ark for all my needs!
Time of Use settings
Let us take this example screen:
Unless you set the charge checkbox, this is set to discharge the battery upto the % value specified for each time interval:
1–5 am
5–9 am
9 am –1 pm
1–5 pm
5–9 pm
And most importantly, the last setting at 9:00 PM stays effective till 1:00 AM the next day. I know this because this is what I saw happening.
It is very important to remember that these settings also mean your battery will never charge (as per my understanding). It will just keep discharging, if the values are set like the screen shot above. So, you will need to set some times for charging as well.
If you set the charge checkbox, it will charge the battery up to the % specified. What I realized is that even though you are setting 7 time intervals, this…
