Connecting Your Tesla

Grid Getter uses Tesla’s official OAuth authorization to connect to your Powerwall and solar system. You log in to Tesla directly — your Tesla password is never sent to or stored by Grid Getter.

Connect during onboarding

If you’re setting up your account for the first time, the onboarding flow will prompt you to connect Tesla after you complete your profile.

When the Connect Your Tesla step appears, click Connect Tesla
You’ll be redirected to Tesla’s login page
Enter your Tesla account email and password
Review the permissions Grid Getter is requesting:
- Read your energy site data (live power, battery state, solar production)
- Send commands to your Tesla system (battery reserve, operational mode)
Click Allow to authorize Grid Getter
You’ll be redirected back to Grid Getter, which moves straight on to site selection — there’s no “connected” confirmation screen to click through
Select your site — if you have multiple Tesla energy sites, choose the one you want to manage. Grid Getter checks which of them Tesla is actually sending data for and preselects that one
Click Continue — your site is confirmed and the same step then asks for your site’s approximate location (see Site Location below)
Set your location or click Skip for now
Answer What is your main concern?, picking whichever is closest to your situation: My demand charge, Time-of-use rates, Solar I export and buy back (shown only if your site has solar), or I’m not sure yet. Your answer picks which measurement Grid Getter runs on your battery history, so the report on the next screen is about the thing you said you cared about. If you don’t know which one you have, pick I’m not sure yet and your own 30 days will decide. You can change it later. Click Skip this question if you’d rather not answer at all
Grid Getter shows a brief Building your plan loading screen while it reads your rate plan and analyzes your Powerwall history, then reveals Your Plan: the plan we found and a report measured from your own battery history

What each answer produces

Your answer	What the report measures
My demand charge	The single worst half-hour of grid draw inside your plan’s on-peak windows, the lowest peak your battery could have held you to instead, and the difference.
Time-of-use rates	The kilowatt-hours you bought in your expensive hours, what they cost, and what the same days would have cost with the battery carrying those hours instead.
Solar I export and buy back	How much solar you exported and how much you bought back on the same days, how much of it your battery had room to keep, and what that round trip cost you.
I’m not sure yet	Whichever of the three above your own last 30 days support. Grid Getter looks for the most expensive pattern in your data, in this order: solar you exported and bought back, power bought in your expensive hours, then your worst half-hour of grid draw. You get that report, and if it turns out to be the demand one and we don’t have your demand rate, the report asks for it rather than sending you somewhere else.
Skip this question	Nothing right away. The plan step goes straight to the plan we found and the automations we’d set up, but Grid Getter keeps measuring your battery in the background. Once there’s enough history, the Live Dashboard shows a banner pointing at whatever stands out most in your own data, and a tap on it opens your report.

Grid Getter decides which hours count as expensive by comparing your own rates, not by looking for a period called “on-peak”. A day’s cheapest rate sets the bar and anything above it is expensive, so partial-peak and super-peak tiers are priced correctly, and a flat rate with no expensive hours reports an honest zero instead of inventing a window.

The time-of-use and solar reports both charge you for the energy a battery loses on the round trip, because storing power and taking it back out isn’t free. Grid Getter measures that efficiency from your own Powerwall over the same 30 days rather than assuming Tesla’s datasheet figure, and prints it in the report’s fine print. If your battery’s numbers don’t look like an efficiency measurement, usually because it ended the month much fuller or emptier than it started, we fall back to 90% and say so rather than reporting a figure we don’t believe.

Those two reports also assume the battery went into every expensive window with its whole usable capacity free, down to the backup reserve you keep — which is what a peak-time schedule actually delivers, and which is why a high reserve shrinks the figure. The fine print under each report says so. (The demand report doesn’t assume it: it works from how full your battery actually was at your worst half-hour.) The two reports differ on what happens to a day the battery could not have helped with. On the time-of-use report, a day where the rates are closer together than the round trip costs to cross is left out of both columns rather than counted as a saving. On the solar report the day stays, priced at what that round trip actually cost you with a floor to match, because you really did buy that power back and none of it was avoidable.

Site Location

Once you confirm your site, the Site Setup step asks where that site is, so Grid Getter can start fetching local weather for your solar forecasting. It’s part of site selection rather than a step of its own — the site has to exist before we can put a location on it. This is optional — click Skip for now to move straight on to your plan reveal, or set your location using the same Country, Postal Code, City, and Browser Location options available from Settings. You can always set or change it later from Settings → Profile.

Your Plan

Right after you pick a site, Grid Getter reads your rate plan directly from Tesla and shows you a Your Plan step. This is where you find out what we detected and what your own battery data shows before you decide whether to upgrade.

The step shows:

The plan we found — the utility rate plan (and utility name) we read from your Tesla energy site, shown as a chip at the top of the step.
Does your plan include demand charges? — whenever Grid Getter can’t confirm a demand charge on your plan, it asks this quick yes/no question first, before the rest of the step. Answer Yes, No, or Not sure (with an optional field for your demand rate, if you know it), and your report below switches from kilowatts to dollars and the automations unlock; until then you’ll see a small energy-only estimate placeholder in their place. This runs any time a demand charge isn’t detected, even if we otherwise matched your plan with high confidence, since demand charges change the math a lot and Tesla doesn’t always surface them cleanly. (Australian plans don’t carry demand charges, so this question is skipped there.)
Your report — measured from your own Powerwall history, not modeled from assumptions. Whichever answer you gave, it ends in the same three figures: what the last 30 days cost you, what they would have cost with the battery carrying them, and the gap between the two. The chart above them changes with the answer. On the demand path it’s a day-by-day chart of your grid peaks with a line marking your floor, headed by the single worst half-hour in the window: the day and time, how hard you pulled from the grid, and how full the battery was when it happened. On the time-of-use path it’s an average weekday, hour by hour, with the expensive hours marked. On the solar path it’s what you sent out and what you took back, hour by hour. If Grid Getter hasn’t collected enough battery history yet to build any of this, the step says so directly instead of leaving a blank space where the report would go.
Welcome back — on a free account, Grid Getter backs off detailed history collection after two weeks without the app being opened on any device: it pauses entirely if nothing depends on that history, or drops to once an hour if you have Battery Protection or a battery alert running, so that rule or alert keeps working. Open the app again (web, iOS or Android all count) and full collection restarts on the spot. If that happened while you were away, the report says so for the next day rather than showing a thinner month without explanation, and says which of the two it did: “we paused” when nothing was running, or “we slowed down and your rule kept running” when something was. Premium and DemandGuard accounts keep collecting whether or not the app is open.
Dollars or kilowatts — the demand report needs a demand rate before it can price anything, and stays in kilowatts until it has one. The time-of-use and solar reports price off the rates already on your Tesla account; on the rare site whose plan carries no rates at all, both stay in kilowatt-hours and the report says which of the two it is rather than leaving the figures unexplained.
A small or zero gap is a real answer — plenty of sites are already running close to their floor, and the report says so plainly rather than manufacturing a number to argue for. A quiet report isn’t the feature coming up empty; it found the same thing your bill would have. It also says which quiet answer it found, because they’re not the same thing: your expensive hours already covered, a backup reserve set high enough that the battery has nothing spare, rates too close together to be worth moving power across, an export credit already worth more than keeping the power would be, or a difference that’s real but smaller than a dollar.
The automations we’d set up — the automations we’d propose for your plan, shown read-only so you know what you’re getting. On a plan with demand charges these are DemandGuard rules, since that’s what the demand half of the estimate above is priced on; on a plan without them they’re peak-time rules. Where one on-peak window repeats across several seasons, it’s shown as a single rule covering all of them rather than one row per season. If you end up subscribing to a tier that doesn’t include DemandGuard, we set the same windows up as peak-time rules instead of leaving you with nothing. If Battery Protection is one of them, it’s shown here for information only — it isn’t turned on by this step; you set it up separately from the Smart Automations setup.
Your demand target — on the demand report, on a plan with demand charges, the kW figure your DemandGuard rules will defend. It doesn’t appear on the time-of-use or solar reports, which aren’t selling a DemandGuard target. Grid Getter fills it in for you from your own data: it’s the lowest peak your battery could actually have held through your worst afternoon of the last 30 days, working from your battery’s capacity, how full it was, and the backup reserve you keep. That’s the same Floor figure shown on the report above, so the number you’re being sold and the number we set up match. Change it if you want more margin: a higher target is easier for your battery to hold but leaves more of the gap on the table, and a target below what your battery can sustain means it runs out of charge before the window ends. The lowest we allow is 0.2 kW.

If your battery could already carry your whole peak period, we say so: keep it charged before the window starts and keep your backup reserve low, and you keep that for free. In that case Premium is the tier that fits you, since there’s no demand charge for DemandGuard to cut. The catch is that this depends on your reserve — holding more charge back for an outage raises the lowest peak you can hold, and that’s the situation DemandGuard is for.

If we couldn’t measure your battery’s data confidently enough (for example, Tesla didn’t return a charge level for your peak day), this doesn’t appear at all rather than guessing at a number.
Activate these automations when I upgrade — a toggle (on by default) that decides whether the automations shown above turn on automatically shortly after you upgrade to Premium or DemandGuard. If you then pick a plan that can’t run them, Grid Getter asks you to confirm first: a free account runs none of them, and Premium sets DemandGuard windows up as peak-time rules instead (the upgrade step offers a one-tap switch to DemandGuard if that’s not what you wanted). If the automatic setup doesn’t complete, you can always add them yourself from the Automations page. Turn the toggle off if you’d rather review and enable them yourself later.

What the two footer buttons do depends on what your report found. If we measured a demand charge worth cutting, the primary button reads Turn on DemandGuard and takes you straight to checkout for the DemandGuard yearly plan, with the price underneath it. If your battery is already covering your peaks, there’s no demand charge for us to cut, so the button reads Try Premium instead and goes to Premium’s checkout: nothing there needs DemandGuard, but Premium is what shows you your battery hour by hour and lets you set the rules it follows. The time-of-use and solar reports point at Premium for the same reason: what they found is a scheduling problem, and scheduling is what Premium buys you. Either way, See all plans sits beside it and goes to the plan-choice screen (free, Premium, or DemandGuard) if you’d rather compare or pay monthly.

On the steps that are still waiting on data, the primary button just reads Continue and both buttons go to the plan-choice screen, with Skip for now beside it.

Whichever you click, it doesn’t decide what happens to the automations proposed above. The Activate these automations when I upgrade toggle does that, and your choices are kept either way. If Grid Getter couldn’t read a rate plan yet, you’ll see a Try again option to re-check with Tesla, or you can continue anyway. We’ll finish setting up your energy plan after signup and you can review it later from Settings → Energy Plan.

On the plan-choice screen, pick Premium or DemandGuard and click Start 1-Week Free Trial — you won’t be charged until your free week ends, and you can cancel anytime before then. Prefer to hold off? Click Start with Free to continue with the free tier instead; you can upgrade later from Settings → Billing.

Reconnect Tesla

If your Tesla connection expires (you’ll see a banner at the top of the app), reconnect it from Settings:

Go to Settings → Integrations
Click Reconnect Tesla
Log in to Tesla and approve the connection
Return to Grid Getter — the banner disappears and live data resumes

Revoking access

You can revoke Grid Getter’s access to your Tesla account at any time:

From Grid Getter: Go to Settings → Integrations and click Disconnect Tesla
From Tesla: Log in to your Tesla account, go to Account → Third-Party Apps, and remove Grid Getter

After revoking access, your automations will stop running until you reconnect.

Troubleshooting connection issues

See Troubleshooting → Tesla connection issues if you’re having trouble connecting.

Next step

Once Tesla is connected, you’re ready to explore the dashboard: Understanding the Dashboard →