AC200L: What's going on?

[ftrueck]

My AC200L is doing weird things I do not understand.

1. AC Inverter draws power from Grid even when the UPS mode is set to Solar Only.
2. Unit gets stuck (software hangs) in strange ways. The Buttons on the unit do not work anymore, Bluetooth connection stops working. Only if I disconnect everything the unit is responding again. Then I have to shut down and power up again to make it work normally.

I discovered that the AC inverter seems to be hardwired in some way to the grid. The setting to use charging from the grid is ignored, so there is always a drain from the grid. I verified this with a wifi smart plug that I plugged in my wall socket and the AC200L in that. When I turn of the AC inverter the power draw from the grid stops. The power draw is not equal to the connected AC load. The grid power draw in the app is shown as 0W. The actual power draw is around 90W and the AC Load is around 157W. PV input is 257W.

[snmya]

I’ve just posted something similar too, although I do not have PV.

Heavy Grid usage when not charging

@BLUETTI_CARE AC200PL (+2xB300). Hello. I am seeing something very strange and illogical. I have Time Control UPS mode and I am now in Peak time. Current charge is 95%, while SOC Low=30, SOC High=90. I am currently using about 300W, and station shows it correctly. It also shows that it is not charging, which is correct and in line with settings. However, it draws from grid 250W constantly! My understanding, this is for internal usage of the station, but then: It is too high, It draws from …

[ftrueck]

Thank you for replying. I guess you also have an AC load running on the AC200L? Did you try to turn of the AC inverter? If yes, you might experience the same as me: As soon as you turn off the AC inverter, the Grid usage goes to 0W. For the moment I use a Smart power plug (tasmota) to turn off grid for my AC200L to get true offline usage with my UPS settings.

[snmya]

Yes, i thought of using smart power plug, but there is 1 huge issue with this approach (and 1 minor one):

1. When grid it is off by timer on smart plug and station is discharged to SOC Low, it will not switch to use Grid, will drain to 0 and everything will die. So if one day you use additional kettle for several times or played GPU-demanding videogame… it’s really bad.
2. It can be turned on/off by timer, but it cannot be turned off when the station is charged (to 100% or SOC High). So the rest of the night it will remain plugged and drain from grid (but it might be not so bad, cause costs are low anyway).

[ftrueck]

I use homeassistant for that.
I use the HACS integration BluettiBT. With that I monitor the SoC. If SoC falls below 20% or time is after 10pm (low price time in my area) the power plug gets turned on. Only downside is: my AC200L seems to crash randomly and bluetooth gets disconnected. This i could not fix yet.

[snmya]

@ftrueck

I use the HACS integration BluettiBT

Is it this one? GitHub - Patrick762/hassio-bluetti-bt: Bluetti Integration for Home Assistant
I don’t have a server to run it on, unfortunately, except my router, which has only Python 2, so it might require a lot of work ((
Still, can you please share your script for the mentioned behavior?

As for crashes, do you mean when using the library, or the station crashes even when not used through the API?

[ftrueck]

With crash I mean: The AC200L becomes partially unresponsive. Buttons on the unit do not react, Bluetooth does not connect. WiFi seems to still work. but the BluettiBT can not use that.

Regarding the integration: Yes this is the one. If you have no server: try a raspberry PI works good with homeassistant.

[snmya]

I’ve just understood another huge issue with smart power plug approach, that cannot be fixed by HomeAssistant:
3. If I plug more consumers (e.g. 3000W) than station’s power (2.4 kWt), with grid connection it will just take 600W from the grid, but when grid is disabled by the plug station will shut down (after it’s short overload timer).