DemandGuard

Adaptive Plan

DemandGuard is Grid Getter’s most powerful automation type. It watches your live grid draw every minute during demand periods and automatically discharges your battery to keep you under your target demand threshold — protecting you from the expensive demand charges that utilities bill based on your peak usage.

What is a demand charge?

Some utility rate plans include a demand charge — a fee based on the highest 15- or 30-minute average power draw recorded during your billing period. A single afternoon of high usage (air conditioning + EV charging + appliances running simultaneously) can spike your bill for the entire month.

DemandGuard prevents those spikes by acting in real time: the moment your grid draw approaches your target, it switches your home to battery power.

How DemandGuard works

DemandGuard runs every minute during your configured peak window. Each check:

Reads your current live power data from Tesla
Calculates your grid draw for the current demand interval against your target threshold
Picks the cheapest state that keeps you under your target — battery power, a grid hold, or (when solar covers your whole house) just solar — and commands your Powerwall accordingly
Watches the following minutes of live power flow to confirm Tesla actually complied, re-sending the command if it didn’t

DemandGuard optimizes battery discharge across the entire demand window — not just in the moment — so your battery lasts as long as possible through the period.

One rule holds everywhere: DemandGuard never forces your battery to charge from the grid. Every hold it uses either keeps the battery’s charge where it is or lets it discharge; grid power is never pushed into your battery mid-window.

Why DemandGuard runs your home on grid power

It can look backwards at first: during a demand window, DemandGuard often holds your home on grid power on purpose. That’s not a mistake — it’s the whole strategy.

A demand charge bills your single highest 15- or 30-minute average draw, not your total usage. Steady grid draw below your target adds nothing to a demand charge. So spending battery to stay off the grid while your usage is already under target buys you nothing — and it drains the one resource you’ll need when usage does spike.

DemandGuard treats your battery as a precision tool instead:

While your grid draw is safely under your target, your home runs on grid and the battery holds its charge.
The moment a demand interval is on track to cross your target, your home switches to battery and the spike is shaved. DemandGuard makes that call a couple of minutes ahead of the crossing point — Powerwall hardware takes a minute or two to act on a command, and the interval keeps billing your draw while it does — so the interval lands safely under your target rather than exactly at it.

That’s what lets a Powerwall protect a whole 4–6 hour demand window: the battery only works during the minutes that would actually cost you. Running the entire window on battery instead — which is what a Peak Time automation does — spends charge on load the grid would have covered for free (demand-wise), and if the battery runs empty mid-window, a single air-conditioner cycle can set your demand charge for the whole month.

Grid charging during the window

When the demand window opens, Grid Getter disables charging from the grid — under both Hold strategies — and re-enables it when the window closes. Charging the battery from the grid on-peak is the worst possible demand event, so it stays blocked for the whole window. The one exception is Respect Tesla’s Storm Watch: when that’s on, Grid Getter leaves Tesla’s grid-charging setting untouched so Storm Watch can still charge if a storm is forecast.

Alongside the grid-charging pause, DemandGuard also stops your battery from discharging while it waits for a threshold event. With Advanced as your Hold strategy that means Backup mode: the battery stops discharging while your home runs on grid power. Solar can still charge it, but the grid can’t, because grid charging is paused. Advanced automations with Storm Watch respected instead raise the backup reserve to the battery’s current charge — never above it — so the battery holds without being forced to charge. Classic automations don’t hold the battery themselves: they switch to Tesla’s autonomous mode and let Tesla decide. During peak, Tesla often runs your home from the battery and sends your solar to the grid, so a full battery can drain during a Classic hold.

When the window closes, your Powerwall is returned to your resting mode. If you haven’t set one yet, Grid Getter restores whatever mode it captured when the window started. If Grid Getter turned grid charging off, it goes back to whatever you had when the window opened. When you keep grid charging off yourself, it stays off. The reserve is handled according to your end setting. The same restore happens if you disable or delete the automation mid-window.

The DemandGuard automation card reflects that setting: it says grid charging is turned off when Storm Watch is not respected, and says grid charging is left unchanged when Storm Watch is respected.

Tesla doesn’t always keep that grid-charging pause in place for the whole window — its own optimizer can quietly resume charging from the grid (often just before your peak period ends, pre-charging for cheaper off-peak rates), and charging the battery from the grid on-peak is the worst possible demand event. So when Grid Getter turned grid charging off, DemandGuard also watches your live power flow every minute: if the grid is caught charging the battery mid-window, the pause is re-sent immediately and you’ll see a “re-disabled grid import” entry in your Activity Log. If DemandGuard was holding the battery in backup mode at the time, that can only happen when something else changed the Powerwall’s mode, so the whole hold is re-applied and the entry reads “re-applied the backup-mode hold” instead. Battery charging that’s covered by your own solar is left alone.

One case the pause can’t fix on its own: if the battery’s backup reserve ends up above its current charge level mid-window — whether from a DemandGuard hold that outlived a dipping charge reading, or a reserve change made outside Grid Getter (the Tesla app or another service) — the Powerwall charges from the grid to catch back up to the reserve, straight through both the mode setting and the grid-charging pause. With the Advanced hold strategy (below), DemandGuard checks the reserve your Powerwall is actually reporting whenever it catches this kind of charging and lowers it to just meet the current charge level, so the on-peak grid charging stops; the Activity Log entry explains what it found and what it changed. The reserve it replaced is still handed back by your end-of-window setting.

Self-powered mode alone isn’t quite enough: Tesla can still pull from the grid in some cases, and a single grid pull during a demand interval can set your demand bill for the whole month.

Hold strategies

Each DemandGuard automation has a Hold strategy that determines how your battery is paused during a grid hold — the stretches of the window where your grid draw is safely under your target and DemandGuard is saving the battery for later. (When your draw approaches your target, DemandGuard switches your home to battery regardless of strategy.)

Advanced (Recommended) — pauses your battery in Backup mode, a hidden Tesla mode that stops the battery discharging at any charge level while your home runs on grid power. Any solar goes into the battery first. Backup mode on its own would charge the battery from the grid toward 100%, so Grid Getter always pairs it with the grid-charging pause described above. This is the most reliable way to stop battery drain during a demand event — without a hold, Tesla’s own optimizer could keep draining the battery on-peak and leave nothing for the end of your demand window.
Classic (Original) — switches your Powerwall between Tesla’s self-powered and autonomous modes and lets Tesla manage the battery. This is the original DemandGuard behavior. During peak, Tesla’s autonomous mode often runs your home from the battery while your solar goes to the grid, so a battery you filled before peak (for example with Pre-Peak Charge) can drain during a Classic hold. Switch to Advanced to keep it.

New automations always use Advanced. Existing automations keep working the way they always have: they stay on Classic until you change them, and the selector is unlocked when you edit one, on the web and in the iOS and Android apps. Once you save a Classic automation as Advanced, the selector locks on Advanced for it — the switch is one-way.

A few paths use a reserve-pin hold instead of Backup mode even on Advanced: automations with Respect Tesla’s Storm Watch on, the solar situation described below, and the fallback when Tesla rejects the Backup-mode switch. A reserve pin raises the backup reserve to the battery’s current charge, rounded down to a whole percent, and releases it when the hold ends. It never goes above the charge.

How the hold adapts to solar

Backup mode diverts all of your solar into the battery for as long as the hold lasts — your whole home runs on grid, and any solar that would have covered house load goes to charging instead. DemandGuard accounts for that cost and, whenever a hold is warranted, picks the cheapest one that still keeps you under your target:

Solar covers your whole house — DemandGuard doesn’t hold on grid at all. Your home runs on solar, extra solar charges the battery, and the battery isn’t drawn down. This applies whether or not Respect Tesla’s Storm Watch is on, and to Classic rules too. A Classic rule set to send surplus solar to the grid gets this once the battery is full, when the surplus exports anyway; below full it still switches to grid to export.
Backup hold — when your whole house load (not just what’s left after solar) fits under your target, DemandGuard pauses the battery in Backup mode and lets solar bank into it, saving that energy for later in the peak window.
Reserve-pin hold — when the whole house load wouldn’t fit under your target but the load after solar would, DemandGuard pins the reserve at the battery’s current charge instead: solar keeps powering the house, the grid covers only what’s left, and the battery holds its charge without Backup mode’s solar diversion.
Battery — when neither hold fits under your target, DemandGuard keeps your home on battery, exactly as it would without any solar in the picture.

Every hold also gets a short settling time. Once DemandGuard moves your home between grid and battery, or steps a hold between Backup and a reserve pin, it keeps that state for at least five minutes before making another optional change — so a passing cloud, or a reading taken while the Powerwall is still applying the last command, can’t make your system flip-flop. Two things never wait for that: a demand spike that is on track to cross your target always switches to battery right away, and a new demand interval resets your budget, so a hold can begin again at the boundary.

If Tesla’s platform ever rejects the Backup-mode switch, Grid Getter falls back to the reserve-pin hold so the demand protection still works. Grid Getter also uses the reserve-pin hold — never Backup mode — whenever your automation has Respect Tesla’s Storm Watch turned on, since Backup mode’s grid-charging-off pairing would otherwise stop Storm Watch from being able to charge your battery. See Storm Watch interaction below.

The hold is released the moment DemandGuard switches back to battery — to your Demand Floor if one is configured, otherwise to the reserve setting captured before the hold. Grid charging isn’t part of that release: once Grid Getter has turned it off for the window, it stays off until the window ends, even if the hold itself has already released earlier in that window. It’s also turned back on early if you disable the automation. You’ll see this as a “holding on grid” entry in your Activity Log, and “reserve returned to N%” when the hold releases.

Tesla acknowledges these commands immediately but can take a few minutes to actually act on them, so after every switch Grid Getter watches your live power flow to confirm the battery really did what was asked. If Tesla hasn’t complied within a few minutes, the command is re-sent automatically (you’ll see a “re-asserted” entry in your Activity Log), and if Tesla still doesn’t comply after two retries, Grid Getter logs that plainly instead of pretending the switch worked.

A battery already at the reserve your Powerwall reports can’t discharge, whatever it’s told. DemandGuard stands down in that case and doesn’t re-send the command, so you won’t see a run of “re-asserted” entries while it sits there.

Classic when switching to grid

When your Hold strategy is set to Classic, DemandGuard instead toggles your Powerwall’s operation mode directly — to Tesla’s autonomous mode to send your home to grid power, and back to self-powered mode to resume running on battery. Tesla’s own optimizer manages the battery in autonomous mode: aside from the one-time reserve raise when the window opens, there’s no pin holding a specific charge level during mid-window grid holds, and (unlike Advanced) Grid Getter doesn’t verify or re-assert that Tesla complied when switching to grid — the same live-power-flow check from Advanced still confirms the return to battery. This is the original DemandGuard behavior, unchanged from before Hold strategies existed.

Paced recharge

If your demand window covers most or all of the day, or runs overnight when solar can’t help, DemandGuard’s grid-charging pause never really lifts — there’s no gap left to refill your battery from the grid. Left alone long enough, everyday household draw runs the battery down with nothing built back in, and the first real spike after that has no charge to draw on.

Paced recharge fixes this without relaxing the pause. Instead, DemandGuard refills your battery from the grid in short, deliberate bursts inside each demand interval — each one sized against your live grid draw so the interval still lands under your target, then it stops. It works with or without solar. When your solar is producing, DemandGuard already banks the surplus into the battery during holds (see Surplus solar), so paced recharge steps aside and picks up again once solar stops, such as overnight.

Paced recharge is rolling out gradually, so the setting may not appear in your account yet.

Requirements

Paced recharge needs:

Hold strategy set to Advanced (the Backup-mode hold)
Respect Tesla’s Storm Watch turned off

If either isn’t set, the Recharge from the grid between spikes switch on the DemandGuard form is disabled, with a note explaining why: “Needs the Advanced hold and Storm Watch not respected.”

Turning it on

On the DemandGuard create/edit form, turn on Recharge from the grid between spikes and set Refill to (%) — the charge level DemandGuard stops recharging at, from 50% to 100% (default 100%). A new burst only starts once your battery is more than 5% below that level (below 95% with the default), so a nearly full battery isn’t topped up a percent at a time. A burst that’s already running charges all the way to the level you set.

Low targets and several Powerwalls

A normal burst charges at Tesla’s full grid-charge rate, about 3.3 kW per Powerwall, and Tesla can’t throttle it. With two or more Powerwalls and a low target, that rate plus your household draw can be more than one interval has room for. When a full-rate burst doesn’t fit, DemandGuard runs a slow burst instead: Self-Powered with grid charging on and the reserve at 100%, about 1.5 kW per Powerwall. If neither rate fits, no burst starts.

A slow burst starts only below 75% and charges to 80% at most, even when Refill to is higher, because Tesla can’t hold a reserve between 81% and 99%. When it ends, DemandGuard sets the reserve at the battery’s level, rounded down, so the charge stays put until the next spike or burst. The Activity Log line says “at the slow rate”.

Three slow bursts in a row that take no charge end slow bursts for the rest of the night. There’s no notification for this pause.

Where a burst leaves the reserve

Slow bursts, and every burst on sites where Backup mode isn’t honored, end in a reserve hold. The reserve normally goes to the battery’s level rounded down. That leaves part of a percent above it, and the battery spends that on your home before it settles. On a large system every percent is more than a kilowatt-hour, so the next burst has to buy that energy back.

When a burst stops because the interval has used up its room, DemandGuard checks whether it can round up instead. A reserve a little above the battery makes the Powerwall charge from the grid to reach it, so DemandGuard prices that extra charge against what’s left of the interval’s budget, including the minute or two Tesla keeps charging after a stop. It only rounds up when the charge fits, and when Tesla can finish it before the interval ends, at the slower rate it charges at after a stop. A charge still running when the next interval starts would land there unplanned, so DemandGuard rounds down instead.

While the battery climbs to a rounded-up reserve, DemandGuard leaves it alone. It doesn’t read that charge as a stop that failed, and it stops waiting for the climb once the interval it was priced in is over.

Tesla’s charge reading can lag a charging battery by up to five minutes. When Grid Getter’s own estimate is higher, DemandGuard may use it, but it prices the extra charge from the lower reading, so a wrong estimate can’t push the interval past its budget.

Every other stop rounds down: reaching your Refill to level, a spike, the burst running too long, or the battery taking no charge. So does a stop after Tesla rejects the switch to the slow rate.

Sites where Backup mode isn’t honored

Some sites can’t use Backup-mode holds, either because of a Tesla Non-Backup Gateway or because the Powerwalls kept charging during a hold (see When Backup mode isn’t honored). Paced recharge still works on those sites. It runs each burst at one of two rates:

Fast: Backup mode with grid charging on, about 3 kW per Powerwall 2.
Slow: Self-Powered with grid charging on and the reserve at 100%, about 1.5 kW per Powerwall 2.

DemandGuard picks fast when the interval has room for it and slow when it doesn’t. When neither rate fits, it waits and starts no burst in that interval. It can drop from fast to slow partway through a burst, but it doesn’t move back up. Either way, a burst is sized to keep the interval at or under 90% of your target. DemandGuard also waits if it can’t yet tell how many Powerwalls the site has, since guessing low could push an interval over your target.

On these sites paced recharge refills to 80% at most, even when Refill to is set higher. Tesla gives no way to hold the battery idle between 80% and 100% here: a reserve in that range is cut to 80%, and a reserve of 100% pulls power from the grid. Any charge above 80% would run straight back out into your home, and the next burst would refill it, cycling the battery all night on grid power. When the burst ends, DemandGuard sets the reserve at the battery’s level, rounded down, so it lands at 80% or a little lower when Tesla’s reading lags. Tesla can keep charging for a minute or two after the stop, so the battery may show a point or two above that before it settles. From there it idles, serving nothing, until DemandGuard needs it for a spike.

A burst only starts once the battery is 10 points under that level (below 70% at 80%), so a battery that DemandGuard hasn’t drawn down for a spike isn’t topped up.

The Activity Log line names the rate, for example: “Recharged battery from grid for 6 min at the slow rate: …”.

What you’ll see

Each burst shows up as its own line in your Activity Log once it finishes, for example:

Recharged battery from grid for 8 min: 0.4 kWh (89% → 90%), keeping this interval under your 1 kW target.

The energy figure is what Grid Getter measured going into the battery, not what the burst was planned to deliver. If the battery took no charge at all, the line says so:

Tried to recharge the battery from the grid for 5 min, but it took no charge (stayed at 89%).

DemandGuard also runs a separate safety check on every burst. If DemandGuard stops checking in while a burst is still charging, that check turns grid charging off within a few minutes and logs:

DemandGuard stopped a battery recharge from the grid that was still running after DemandGuard stopped checking in.

Limits

No bursts start while your solar is producing. Solar surplus refills the battery then, and paced recharge covers the hours solar can’t.
At most one burst runs per demand interval.
Bursts ride the Backup-mode hold, so on a standard rule they stop for good if DemandGuard switches it to reserve holds (see Sites where Backup mode isn’t honored for how those sites recharge instead).
No burst starts at 95% or above, even when Refill to is higher. Tesla barely charges a nearly full battery in Backup mode, so a burst that high would buy little or nothing. A burst already running can carry on to your Refill to level. On sites where Backup mode isn’t honored the numbers are lower: bursts start below 70% and stop at 80% (see Sites where Backup mode isn’t honored).
A burst stops early if the battery takes no measurable charge for 5 minutes. Tesla sometimes accepts the grid-charge command without charging, and DemandGuard won’t keep the site in a charging state that isn’t charging.
Each burst is sized against your usual load for that hour: the 75th percentile of your home’s load in the same hour of the day over the past 7 days, from at least 3 readings. Without that history, such as on a new site or after a data gap, DemandGuard doesn’t recharge.
Energy used during a burst is billed at your normal grid rate; it isn’t free.
Tesla decides the actual charge rate, which is why bursts stay short — DemandGuard sizes each one to whatever headroom is left in the current interval, then stops itself before it would push you over target.

24-hour DemandGuard

Some utilities — most often commercial rate plans — measure demand at any time of day, with no peak/off-peak split. On those plans a fixed 4–9 PM monitoring window leaves you exposed for the other 19 hours, and a single morning grid spike can set your bill for the whole month.

For example, Colorado’s CORE Cooperative commercial rate structure bills demand based on the highest 15-minute draw recorded at any point in the billing period.

To switch DemandGuard to 24-hour mode, toggle 24 hours a day under the Start/End time fields on the DemandGuard form. The Start and End time inputs gray out, and DemandGuard runs continuously for the full day on whichever days and months you’ve selected.

One thing to expect on the Live Dashboard: the “Measurement Intervals” counter that normally tracks your progress through a peak period is hidden in 24-hour mode. Without a bounded peak window there’s no fixed number of intervals to count down from, so the dashboard just shows the current Demand Usage ring on its own.

Create a DemandGuard automation

Go to Automations and click + Add Automation
Select the DemandGuard tab
Give your automation a name
Set your Target Demand — the grid draw at which the battery starts covering your load (e.g., 8 kW). This is a threshold, not a cap on what your meter records. The web editor accepts 0.2 to 250 kW. The current iPhone and Android apps only accept up to 50 kW, and the iPhone app won’t save any change to a rule whose target is above 50 kW, not even to its schedule or name. Until the next app release, edit those rules on the web.
Set the Demand Interval — how often your utility measures demand (usually 15 or 30 minutes — check your bill)
Set the monitoring window:
- Start Time: when demand monitoring begins
- End Time: when it stops
- Or toggle 24 hours a day if your utility doesn’t have a peak window (see 24-hour DemandGuard above)
Times are interpreted in your account’s timezone, pre-filled from your profile (or your browser’s detected timezone if your profile has none). Confirm it’s correct before saving.
Configure optional settings:
- Hold strategy (shown only when editing a Classic automation; new automations are always Advanced): how DemandGuard pauses your battery during grid holds — Advanced (the Backup-mode hold, always used for new automations) or Classic (the original mode-switching behavior). See Hold strategies.
- Battery Reserve: set a reserve to apply at the start of the demand window and choose what happens at the end — either restore it to what it was before DemandGuard started, or set it to a specific percentage.
- Demand Floor: let DemandGuard keep shaving below your normal reserve during the window — see Demand Floor
- Weather Guard: skips the Demand Floor when severe weather is expected (on by default)
- Respect Tesla’s Storm Watch: if on, DemandGuard pauses when Storm Watch is active and leaves grid charging unrestricted so Storm Watch can pre-charge for emergencies (recommended for storm-prone areas)
- Surplus Generation (Classic only): what to do with excess solar during demand management. Advanced automations always store surplus in the battery — see Surplus solar
- Recharge from the grid between spikes: refills your battery from the grid in short bursts that keep each interval under your target, and Refill to sets where it stops. Needs the Advanced hold with Storm Watch not respected. See Paced recharge.
Set the schedule — days of week and months that match your utility’s demand period schedule

A window that crosses midnight belongs to the day it starts. Days of week and months only decide which days a window can start on, and it ends one window-length later. For example, Mon–Fri 20:30–02:00 runs Friday night until 02:00 Saturday, but doesn’t start Saturday night.
Click Create Automation

Settings reference

Setting	What it does	Default
Name	Label for this automation	Required
Description	Optional note	Empty
Target Demand (kW)	Grid draw at which the battery starts covering your load	2 kW (Smart Automations uses your site’s measured target when it has one)
Demand Interval	How often your utility measures demand	Your rate plan’s interval when Grid Getter knows it (a preset’s, or the window a plan found through Find my plan states), otherwise 30 min
Start Time	When monitoring begins	16:00 (4 PM)
End Time	When monitoring ends	21:00 (9 PM)
24 hours a day	Replaces Start/End with a 24-hour window. For utilities that measure demand at any time of day.	Off
Hold strategy	How DemandGuard pauses your battery during grid holds: Advanced (Backup-mode hold) or Classic (original mode switching)	Advanced, always for new automations (existing Classic automations stay Classic until you switch them)
Battery Reserve at Start	Reserve % applied when the demand window begins	Off
End Reserve Mode	What to do with the reserve at window end: Restore to previous or Set to specific %	Off
Battery Reserve at End	Reserve % applied when the window ends (only visible when End Reserve Mode is “Set to specific %“)	Off
Demand Floor	Temporarily lowers your reserve to a floor when the window opens so DemandGuard has more room to shave, then restores it when the window closes (minimum 5%). When off, DemandGuard never lowers your reserve below the one you already have.	Off (10% when enabled)
Weather Guard	Skips lowering your reserve for Demand Floor when Storm Watch is active, a severe weather alert covers your site, or weather data is missing or stale	On
Keep battery level after the window	At window end, sets your reserve to wherever the battery is so it holds that charge overnight instead of draining to your usual reserve. See Keeping your charge after the window.	On for new automations
Minimum overnight reserve	With “Keep battery level after the window”: if the window drained the battery below this, it grid-charges back up to it (0–80%)	None
Respect Tesla’s Storm Watch	Pause DemandGuard if Storm Watch activates and leave grid charging unrestricted so Storm Watch can pre-charge for emergencies	Off
Surplus Generation	Where excess solar goes during demand management (Classic only — Advanced always stores surplus in the battery)	Store in Battery
Recharge from the grid between spikes	Refills your battery from the grid in short bursts sized to keep each interval under your target. Needs the Advanced hold with Storm Watch not respected. See Paced recharge.	Off
Refill to	Charge level where paced recharge stops (50–100%)	100%
Days of Week	Which days it runs	Mon–Fri
Months	Which months it’s active. Pick at least one	All months

Choosing the right Target Demand

Your target demand should be set below the threshold that would trigger a demand charge tier change on your utility bill.

Check your bill for the demand tier thresholds (e.g., “0–10 kW: $X/kW, 10+ kW: $Y/kW”)
Set your target 1–2 kW below the tier boundary to give DemandGuard room to act before you breach it
For most residential customers with a Powerwall, a target of 6–10 kW works well as a starting point

Two things limit what any target can deliver, and neither is changed by the setting:

Your battery’s power ceiling. A Powerwall delivers a fixed maximum in kW. Once your home’s load exceeds your target plus that ceiling, the excess comes from the grid no matter what you set. A target below what your system can physically hold simply won’t be fully reached — that costs you nothing, it just won’t be met.
Your usable energy. A high Demand Floor leaves only a small slice of the pack available, which can empty the battery before the demand period ends. If DemandGuard seems to stop helping partway through the window, check the Demand Floor before changing the target.

Power ceiling

Every battery has a maximum output. A Powerwall 2 delivers about 5 kW, a Powerwall 3 about 11.5 kW, and two units roughly double it. Once your home’s load exceeds your target plus that ceiling, the excess comes from the grid whatever the target says. No setting in Grid Getter changes that. This section is about showing you where the limit sits.

Where the ceiling comes from

Grid Getter resolves one ceiling per site; every surface below reads the same number.

Rated. Tesla reports a nameplate power for your system. That is the ceiling by default.
Measured. Your own telemetry can lower the rating, but only when it looks like a hardware limit rather than a house that never drew full power: at least 30 days of battery data, at least 5 separate days topping out near the same figure, and that figure between 60% and 90% of the rating. When it qualifies, the ceiling becomes the highest discharge your battery sustained across one billing interval. A site that peaked at 4.3 kW against an 11.5 kW rating is a quiet house, not a 4.3 kW battery, so it keeps the rating.
Estimated. If Tesla hasn’t reported a rating, the ceiling is a guess from the battery model and count. Nothing on this page passes a verdict on an estimate.

The floor

The floor is the lowest billing interval your battery could have held on your heaviest recent window day. The interval is the one your DemandGuard rule bills on (a half-hour on most plans; some are 15 minutes or an hour), and every line below names yours. It has two parts, and the higher one wins:

Power floor. Your peak interval’s net load (what the house draws beyond solar) minus the ceiling. If the house pulled 11 kW and the battery can supply 5.8 kW, the floor is at least 5.2 kW.
Energy floor. The lowest level the pack could have held across the whole window before it ran out of usable charge. A high Demand Floor raises it: an 80% Demand Floor leaves about 2.7 kWh of a 13.5 kWh pack for DemandGuard, and on most houses that makes energy, not power, the binding limit.

Grid Getter recomputes both nightly from your last 30 days of complete DemandGuard windows. It needs at least 10 complete window days before it says anything. Only whole billing intervals inside your window count, the way your utility bills them: if your window runs 1:59 to 8:00 PM, the floor reads 2:00 to 8:00 PM, and a minute of charging at 1:59 never counts as a half-hour peak.

In the DemandGuard form

Once your site clears that bar, a scale appears under Target Demand with your floor and ceiling marked on it and your target as a marker. Beneath it, a line updates as you type:

At 3.0 kW, your worst half-hour over the last 30 days would have been about 4.8 kW.

On a 15-minute plan the same line reads “your worst 15-minute interval”; on an hourly plan, “your worst hour.”

That line replays your own telemetry against the target you typed. Each night Grid Getter backtests every target from 0 kW up to your highest peak in 0.25 kW steps, storing the worst interval and the number of days held at each step. The form reads from that table as you type, so nothing is recomputed in the browser.

The notice takes one of three tones:

Below the floor (amber): “Below what your battery can hold on heavy days.” It says which limit applies, the ceiling or the pack running out of charge, and names your Demand Floor’s share of the pack when that is the cause. Expect some intervals above the target. It never suggests raising it: a lower target still puts the battery to work on lighter days.
Between the floor and the ceiling (green): “Held on 14 of 19 recent window days.” The count is how many evaluated days the backtest held at or under your target.
Above the ceiling (gray): “Above your battery’s ceiling.” A target above the ceiling leaves the battery idle during smaller peaks, which usually raises your demand charge.

With an estimated ceiling the notice shows the estimate and one line: estimates are not used to judge your target.

Target missed at full power

Some misses have nothing to do with the target or the energy in the pack. The battery was giving everything it had, and the house wanted more. Grid Getter marks a window day power-limited when all three hold:

the billed interval came in more than 0.3 kW above your target;
inside that interval, the battery sat at 90% or more of its ceiling on at least two one-minute samples;
the pack did not run empty: its lowest charge stayed more than 2 points above the reserve in effect during the window.

On a day like that, lowering your target changes nothing. Another Powerwall would.

Once it happens on at least two of your recent window days, you’ll see it in three places:

Live Dashboard card. A Target missed — battery at full power card names the worst window (“Thu Sep 10, 7:00–7:30 PM”) and shows house load, battery output and grid draw in kW for the peak sample inside it, how much energy was left in the pack, and your ceiling with its source. See the math links back here. The × dismisses it for 30 days; if the pattern continues, it returns after that.
Automations page banner. One line above your automation list: “Battery at full power on 3 of 19 recent window days.” Review DemandGuard opens the automation it was measured on.
In-app note. The first time the card appears, a notification titled We measured your battery’s power ceiling (or Your battery’s power ceiling, when the figure is Tesla’s rating) tells you the number. It arrives in the notification bell only, since the nightly run finishes around 3 AM local, and it isn’t repeated for at least six months.

A fourth doesn’t wait for two days. Shortly after any DemandGuard window ends power-limited, you get a push: Peak window over — target missed. “Your battery ran at full power. House load hit 11.2 kW; your Powerwall can cover 5.8.” Grid Getter looks for just-closed windows a few minutes past every hour, so it lands between five minutes and about an hour after the window closes. You get at most one per site every 30 days, none while the dashboard card is dismissed, and none when your ceiling is only an estimate.

Demand Interval setting

The demand interval tells DemandGuard how your utility measures peak demand. This should match your actual utility billing:

15 minutes — most common for commercial accounts in the US
30 minutes — common for some residential TOU plans
60 minutes — less common, used by some utilities

Getting this right matters: DemandGuard uses the interval to optimize how aggressively it discharges your battery across the demand window.

When your rule and your plan disagree

A rule keeps the interval it was created with. If your energy plan states a different demand window, the DemandGuard form shows a note under Demand Interval with the plan’s value and a Use N minutes button. Averaging over a longer window than your utility uses can let short peaks through, and a shorter one makes DemandGuard hold the battery back more than it needs to. Grid Getter never changes the stored interval on its own: the note only appears when your plan actually states a window, and it goes away once the rule matches.

Surplus solar

During demand management, your solar panels may still be producing more power than your home needs.

Advanced automations always store that surplus in your battery — there’s no setting to configure. Storing surplus builds up the exact reserve DemandGuard needs to shave demand later in the window, and it’s the only surplus behavior Grid Getter can reliably command: routing surplus to the grid instead would hand control to Tesla’s own optimizer, which may choose to charge rather than export and always defers to the export preference set in your Tesla app. Once your battery is full, Tesla automatically exports the excess to the grid according to those Tesla export settings — so you still earn any net metering credits on a full battery.

Classic automations keep the original three-way setting:

Option	What happens
Send to Grid	Grid Getter asks Tesla to export surplus solar to the grid. Tesla’s optimizer and your Tesla export settings decide whether export actually happens. Once the battery is full, Grid Getter leaves it self-powered instead: a full battery exports the surplus anyway, and the export mode can run your house off the battery during peak.
Store in Battery (default)	Surplus charges your battery instead of exporting. Useful if grid export rates are low or zero.
No Action	Grid Getter doesn’t control surplus — Tesla handles it according to its own logic.

Battery Reserve during demand windows

DemandGuard can optionally manage your Tesla backup reserve at the start and end of each demand window.

At the start of the demand window, DemandGuard stops the battery from discharging while it waits for a threshold event. With Advanced, Backup mode pauses the battery — the hold doesn’t depend on the reserve at all — and the reserve is set straight to your Demand Floor when you’ve configured one (otherwise your reserve is left where it was). On Advanced’s reserve-pin paths, the reserve is instead temporarily raised to the battery’s current charge — never above it, so the battery is never forced to charge. With Classic, the reserve is set to your Demand Floor when you’ve configured one, and the hold itself is left to Tesla’s autonomous mode.

At window end, you pick what happens to the reserve:

Restore to previous — Grid Getter records your reserve just before the window starts and puts it back when the window closes. Use this if your reserve changes for other reasons throughout the day and you don’t want DemandGuard leaving it at a fixed value. If you change the reserve during the window, in Grid Getter or with one of your Custom Schedule automations, DemandGuard puts back your new value instead of the one from before the window. Changes made in the Tesla app aren’t visible to Grid Getter, so those still get the pre-window value.
Set to a specific % — Explicitly define what the reserve should be after the window ends.

On the paths that raise the reserve, DemandGuard does so even if you have not configured a custom reserve value. Those temporary raises are released automatically when DemandGuard switches back to battery or when the window ends. Mid-window, the reserve goes back to your Battery Reserve at Start (your Demand Floor, if you use one) so the battery can discharge right away. Only a rule with no start reserve goes back to the level you had before the hold.

Holding a full battery

With Advanced as your Hold strategy, Backup mode holds your battery at whatever charge level it’s actually at when a grid hold starts — 100%, 93%, any number — with no clamping. This is what makes Advanced reliable for batteries sitting in the 81-99% range that Tesla’s app and cloud API otherwise refuse to pin directly.

If Tesla ever rejects the Backup-mode switch, DemandGuard falls back to the reserve-pin hold, which does run into that Tesla limitation: when the window opens with the battery at exactly 100%, the fallback holds it full with a 100% reserve, but anywhere between 81% and 99% it can only hold at 80% in Autonomous mode — Tesla won’t honor a reserve in that range, and pinning 100% over a not-quite-full battery would force it to charge from the grid during your demand window.

Tesla adds one wrinkle on that fallback path: a battery reading 100% can drift down a couple of percent while idle as Tesla recalibrates its charge estimate. Under a 100% reserve hold, that drift makes Tesla start charging from the grid to close the gap — mid-window, exactly when grid draw costs the most. DemandGuard monitors for this every minute: if it catches the grid charging the battery because of its own hold, it lowers the hold to 80% (Autonomous) for the rest of the window and writes an entry to your Activity Log explaining what it saw and what it changed.

Demand Floor

Turn on Demand Floor to let DemandGuard keep shaving after your battery reaches its normal Battery Protection reserve. Grid Getter keeps your reserve at the demand floor (default 10%, minimum 5%) for the length of the window so the battery can discharge for demand shaving. Without a Demand Floor configured, releasing a hold simply returns the reserve to whatever it was before — your own setting is never lowered. At the end of the window it restores whatever was there before by default, or you can set an explicit end percentage instead under Advanced: at end of DemandGuard window.

The trade-off: during the window you keep less battery held back for outages, in exchange for more room to hold your grid demand down.

The floor is the level the battery stops at, not a low-battery alert. Set it to 25% or higher and the form warns you how much of the pack DemandGuard is left with: at 80%, only the top 20% is usable during the window, about 2.7 kWh of a 13.5 kWh Powerwall. Most homes do best between 10% and 20%.

If the battery is already below the floor when the window opens, or when DemandGuard hands the house back to the battery, the reserve goes to the battery’s current level, rounded down, instead. A reserve above the battery makes your Powerwall charge from the grid to reach it, even with grid charging off, and that would happen during peak.

Weather Guard

Weather Guard (on by default) skips lowering your reserve when severe weather is expected — either Tesla Storm Watch is active or your area has an active Severe/Extreme weather alert. If weather data is missing or stale, Grid Getter plays it safe and leaves your reserve untouched.

Note: your demand charge is usually set by your single highest usage period each month. When Weather Guard keeps your reserve high during severe weather, a spike that evening can still set your monthly demand charge.

Weather Guard needs your site’s location to check for severe weather alerts. If your account has no location set, the toggle is disabled and off, with a Set Location link straight to Settings → Profile.

When the floor is reached

If your battery reaches the demand floor while the window is still open, Grid Getter sends you a notification — from that point your remaining home usage may draw from the grid until the window ends.

The same applies without a Demand Floor when your battery reaches its normal reserve: DemandGuard detects the grid draw and holds your home on grid power for the rest of the window. No notification is sent in that case — the floor-reached alert is part of the Demand Floor feature.

If your battery is already below the floor before the window even opens, Grid Getter sends a heads-up — “Battery below your demand floor” — so you can charge before the window starts instead of pulling fully from the grid the moment it does.

Grid Getter also notifies you when Weather Guard or Tesla Storm Watch is holding your reserve steady during an active window instead of lowering it to the floor, so a lower-than-expected discharge isn’t a surprise.

Keeping your charge after the window

In Self-Powered mode the battery drains to your reserve every night, whatever is left in it. If you would rather keep that charge — less cycling, more backup for an outage — turn on Keep battery level after the window. When the window ends, Grid Getter sets your reserve to the level the battery is at, rounded down to a whole percent, so a battery that finishes at 63.7% holds at 63% until the next window starts, when your Demand Floor and other reserve settings take over again.

Set a Minimum overnight reserve if you want a floor under that: when the window drains the battery below the minimum, Tesla charges it back up to the minimum from the grid.

Two things to know:

Tesla can’t hold a reserve between 81% and 99%, so a battery that ends the window above 80% settles at 80%.
Holding the charge also keeps the battery from exporting after the window. If you take part in a virtual power plant or sell to the grid in the evening, leave this off.

If you turn the setting off while a window is running, the form tells you what the reserve will go back to when the window ends — the level it had before the window started, or your configured end reserve — and lets you set an end-of-window reserve instead.

While a hold is in force, the Battery section of the Live Dashboard says so — which automation is holding it, at what level, and what it goes back to at the next window start — with buttons to change the reserve now or set a Demand Floor. The level it goes back to is the reserve you had before the hold. If that isn’t what you want during the window, set a Demand Floor, or change your reserve and the hold ends there. Turning the holding rule off doesn’t release the hold: the reserve stays where it is until you change it, and the Battery section says so.

Storm Watch interaction

When Respect Tesla’s Storm Watch is turned on, DemandGuard pauses automatically if Tesla’s Storm Watch feature activates. Storm Watch charges your battery to 100% for emergency preparedness — if DemandGuard tried to discharge it at the same time, they’d conflict.

The grid-charging pause has a second effect that’s worth understanding. Tesla doesn’t notify Grid Getter when Storm Watch turns on, so if we hard-blocked grid charging at the start of every DemandGuard window, Storm Watch wouldn’t be able to top off your battery for an incoming storm. The toggle splits the difference:

Respect Tesla’s Storm Watch ON — Grid Getter does NOT touch Tesla’s grid-charge setting during the demand window, and holds your home on grid power with the reserve-pin hold instead of Backup mode (Backup mode’s grid-charging-off pairing would otherwise get in Storm Watch’s way). DemandGuard still discharges the battery to keep you under your target, and Storm Watch can still grid-charge to 100% if a storm is forecast. The tradeoff: a Storm-Watch grid pull may briefly raise your demand reading.
Respect Tesla’s Storm Watch OFF (default for new automations) — Grid Getter strictly disables grid charging at the start of the window and re-enables it at the end, and re-sends the disable if Tesla is caught resuming grid charging mid-window. You get tighter demand-charge protection, but Storm Watch can’t pre-charge from the grid for emergencies during the window.

Pick the side of the tradeoff that fits your area. In a low-storm-risk area, the default (off) gets you the strictest demand-charge protection. In a high-storm-risk or wildfire area, turning it on keeps Storm Watch usable for outages and — as a side effect — switches Advanced automations over to the reserve-pin hold described above instead of Backup mode.

DemandGuard performance log

Every decision DemandGuard makes is logged. Go to Activity Log → DemandGuard Decisions to review:

When DemandGuard activated during demand periods
What your grid draw was at each check
What action was taken
Whether your target was maintained

This is the best way to verify DemandGuard is working and to tune your Target Demand setting.

DemandGuard’s demand math depends on an unbroken minute-by-minute measurement series. If a check is ever missed (a brief service interruption, for example), the next run fills in the missing minutes automatically, assuming they saw the same reading it sees now. Filled-in entries are labeled Backfilled in the log so you can tell them apart from real measurements.

Battery Threshold overlap warning

Battery Threshold can’t run inside a DemandGuard window. If a turned-on Battery Threshold automation with a custom window overlaps this DemandGuard window, saving or turning on the DemandGuard turns that Battery Threshold rule off. Grid Getter first shows a Turn off Battery Protection? dialog that lists the affected rules, and nothing changes if you cancel. When Smart Automations proposes a DemandGuard, its review step names the rules that saving will turn off. The rule’s activity log records why it was turned off. You can turn it back on after moving its window outside DemandGuard’s. A 24-hour DemandGuard overlaps every custom window.

If your Battery Threshold automation uses Outside Peak Time and DemandGuard windows mode, it automatically adapts to any DemandGuard automations you add, with no overlap concern. Stopping or disabling DemandGuard mid-window frees that time for Battery Threshold, which can then charge from the grid on peak. See When you stop DemandGuard mid-window.

If your Tesla goes offline during a demand window

If your Tesla connection drops while DemandGuard is active and your Powerwall is left in Self Consumption mode when the window ends, Grid Getter catches this on reconnect.

When your Tesla comes back online, Grid Getter checks whether your Powerwall is stuck in Self Consumption outside of any active demand window. If it is, Grid Getter restores the operation mode you had before the window started — Self-Powered users stay Self-Powered rather than being switched to Time-Based Control — and logs it in your Activity Log.

Plan requirements

DemandGuard automations require an Adaptive subscription. Adaptive includes everything in Scheduled, so you don’t need both.

See Subscription Tiers for pricing.