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 do you want your battery to do? Pick one or more: Cut my demand charge, Cut my peak-rate energy cost, Keep backup for outages, or Just protect my battery and leave me alone. If you don’t know yet, pick I’m not sure yet. Your goals decide which measurement Grid Getter runs on your battery history and which automations it recommends. These are the same goals as Smart Automations. Click Skip this question if you’d rather not answer at all
If your Powerwall doesn’t have a utility rate plan set up in Tesla yet, Grid Getter asks for one here, before your plan (see Set up your energy plan below). Sites that already have a rate plan skip straight to the next step
A few questions. Some goals need a follow-up or two, for example how much battery to keep during peak, or which matters more when you picked both cost goals. The questions are the same as in Smart Automations. If your goals need none, or you skipped the goals, this step doesn’t appear
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 goals	What the report measures
Include Cut 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.
Include Cut my peak-rate energy cost (but not the demand goal)	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.
Keep backup for outages or Just protect my battery alone, or I’m not sure yet	Whichever report 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. If it turns out to be the demand report and we don’t have your demand rate, the report asks for it.
Skip this question	No report 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. Tap it to open your report.

With I’m not sure yet or Skip this question, Grid Getter builds the automations as if you’d picked Cut my demand charge on a plan with demand charges, or Cut my peak-rate energy cost otherwise.

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.

Everything these three reports assume is set out in How we calculate your numbers: your pack’s usable capacity, how the backup reserve is handled, the round-trip efficiency band, and the way demand blocks are priced.

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.

Set up your energy plan

Grid Getter reads your utility rate plan from Tesla. Without one, there are no expensive hours to build automations around and no rates to price your savings with, so if your Powerwall doesn’t have a rate plan in Tesla yet, onboarding asks you to add one after What do you want your battery to do? and before Your Plan. You can:

Pick your utility plan — enter your ZIP code and click Search to see the plans your utility offers, the same search as Find my plan in Settings → Energy Plan. When a ZIP returns a long list, it stays about six plans tall and scrolls. Picking a plan folds the other results away behind Show N other plans and brings Continue into view. Pick yours, click Continue to check its rates, then Use this plan. The ZIP you searched is also saved as your home’s location for weather, so you won’t be asked for it again.
Enter your rates — build a custom plan for any utility with the same rate editor used in Settings.
Use the Tesla app instead — set your utility rate plan in your Powerwall’s settings in the Tesla app. Grid Getter reads it from Tesla automatically.

Either way, the plan is saved to your Tesla account and Grid Getter goes straight on to build your plan with it. Click Skip for now if you’d rather do this later. Your Plan will then say Add your rate plan to see your plan instead of showing proposed automations, with an Add rate plan button that brings this step back, or Continue to carry on. You can add a rate plan at any time from Settings → Energy Plan.

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. It’s our best match, so a Not your plan? link sits beside it: it opens Which plan are you on? with the plan we found already selected, and you can search by ZIP for the right one. The plan you pick answers the demand-charge question the same way it does below. If it has a demand charge and differs from the rates Tesla holds, you choose whether to keep Tesla’s rates or update Tesla. While the demand-charge question below is still open, the link is disabled with Confirm your plan in the question below., and you confirm your plan through that question instead.
Does your plan include demand charges? — whenever Grid Getter can’t confirm a demand charge on your plan, it asks about it first, before the rest of the step. Once it’s answered, 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.)
- Which rate plan are you on? The question is your plan rather than a yes/no, because your plan already says whether you pay a demand charge. The plan Grid Getter thinks you’re on is shown first as Your likely plan and already selected, so you can click Continue and Use this plan without searching; search by ZIP if it’s not yours. Either way the plan you pick is saved as your plan, replacing the one we matched from Tesla. A plan with a demand charge is saved with its rates; a plan without one answers “no demand charge” straight away, with nothing more to confirm, and DemandGuard drops out of your recommendations. If the plan you pick differs from the rates Tesla holds, with or without a demand charge, you choose whether to keep Tesla’s rates or update Tesla; nothing is sent to Tesla unless you choose to update it.
- I can’t find my plan (or Build a custom plan in the picker) switches to the yes/no question: answer Yes, No, or Not sure, with an optional field for your demand rate in $/kW if you know it. Search for my plan takes you back to the plan search.
- If the plan’s rates differ from the rate plan saved in your Tesla app, you’ll see This plan doesn’t match Tesla with each charge side by side. Keep Tesla’s rates leaves your Tesla settings as they are. Update Tesla to this plan saves the plan you picked to your Tesla account. Either way your answer is kept and the step carries on. Nothing is changed in Tesla unless you choose to update it.
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. Scheduled and Adaptive 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. When it has none, the report itself asks for it: Which rate plan are you on?, with the same plan picker as above and your likely plan selected. It works the same way: a plan with a demand charge prices the report, a plan without one leaves it in kilowatts with nothing more to confirm, and either is saved as your plan and compared with Tesla’s rates. I can’t find my plan switches to What does your utility charge per kW?: type your rate and click Price my peak, or click Find my plan to go back to the search. Keep it in kW skips the question. 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 your goals call for, built on the plan we found. They’re the same rows as the Smart Automations review: Pre-Peak Charge before peak and DemandGuard or Peak Time on each peak window. Battery Protection all day comes with Keep backup for outages on its own or Just protect my battery. Each row has a checkbox and a badge for the tier it needs. The rows are recommended for the tier your goals need, not for the free account you have today, so the upgrade step offers that tier. Uncheck anything you don’t want. Under the rows, a note reminds you that these are ordinary automations: once you’re set up, you can edit, pause or delete any of them from the Automations tab, or run Smart Automations again to change your goals. A row with a lock has a See plans link: it keeps the rows you’ve checked and takes you to the upgrade step, the same place Continue goes. If the rows can’t be refreshed, a Retry button appears above them, and you can still continue with the rows shown.
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 Scheduled 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.
Turning them on — the rows you leave checked turn on shortly after you upgrade to Scheduled or Adaptive. If you then pick a plan that can’t run some of them, Grid Getter asks you to confirm first. A free account runs none of them. Scheduled sets DemandGuard windows up as Peak Time rules, and Pre-Peak Charge as a Charge before peak Battery Protection rule, which charges from the grid before every peak, even on sunny days, instead of filling from solar first. The upgrade step offers a one-tap switch to Adaptive if that’s not what you wanted. If the automatic setup doesn’t complete, you can add them yourself from the Automations page.

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 Adaptive 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 Scheduled instead and goes to Scheduled’s checkout: nothing there needs DemandGuard, but Scheduled 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 Scheduled for the same reason: what they found is a scheduling problem, and scheduling is what Scheduled buys you. Either way, See all plans sits beside it and opens the plan-choice screen (Free, Scheduled, or Adaptive) at the top 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.

Neither button changes which automations turn on. The rows you left checked decide that, and Grid Getter keeps your choices 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 Scheduled or Adaptive 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 →