What settings should my Sol-ark 18k inverter be set at when it seems Im using a lot of grid power and not much Battery.

Bit off-piste for a UK forum but I'll bite — the Sol-Ark 18k is a beast and the settings rabbit hole is real. 🐇

First question I'd be asking: what's your battery minimum SOC set to? If it's sitting at 50% or higher, the inverter will lean on grid before it even thinks about touching your batteries properly — seen this trip people up more times than I can count.

Also worth checking:

• Grid charge current — if it's set aggressively high, it'll happily hoover up grid power like my neighbour's hot tub on a Friday night
• Battery discharge rate — too conservative and it'll throttle battery output before grid even breaks a sweat
• Time-of-use settings — might be prioritising grid during periods you don't expect

My Victron setup over here in the UK does something similar if I leave the ESS assistant misconfigured — suddenly I'm feeding the grid my solar AND pulling grid power simultaneously like some sort of energy clown. 🤡

What does your battery voltage look like under load? And are your Fogstar/whatever cells properly balanced? BMS communication issues can make the inverter think batteries are weaker than they are and default to grid.

Anyone else on here running Sol-Arks? Curious if the Sol-Ark community has specific firmware versions that behave better — some of these settings apparently changed behaviour after updates.

@Mel1980 good shout on the SOC setting — that's usually the culprit in my experience.

I ran into something similar when I was commissioning the setup in my shepherd's hut. The inverter was defaulting to grid the moment batteries dipped below 50%, which felt wasteful when I had perfectly usable capacity sitting there.

Worth also checking your grid tie-in priority — some units default to Grid > Battery rather than Battery > Grid straight out of the box. Feels backwards but there it is.

Not a Sol-Ark user myself (we're fairly Victron-heavy on this side of the pond), but the logic is universal across hybrid inverters. If the grid is cheaper or more "reliable" in the inverter's eyes, it'll lean on it without shame.

What does your battery bank look like — lithium or lead? That changes the usable SOC window considerably.

Check your grid charge/discharge priority settings too — if it's set to "Grid First" rather than "Battery First" it'll just burn through your import like a drunk uncle at an open bar.

Great points already from @Mel1980 and @ExBrickie94. One thing nobody's mentioned yet — check your grid tie-in threshold voltage. If your battery nominal voltage isn't set correctly, the inverter can misread SOC and lean on grid far earlier than it should.

Also worth checking your AC input voltage/frequency window — if the tolerance is too tight, the Sol-Ark may keep dropping back to grid unnecessarily even with healthy battery reserves.

On the Victron side we'd call this "grid setpoint" — the Sol-Ark equivalent needs careful calibration based on your actual battery chemistry. What cells are you running? LFP, AGM? Because the discharge curves are dramatically different and if your battery profile is set wrong, every voltage reading the inverter takes will be skewed, making grid reliance look like the "safe" option to the system's logic.

Not a unit I've got direct hands-on with — my setup is Victron-based, built around keeping the narrowboat and the house backed up through grid outages — but the logic is universal across most hybrid inverters.

One thing worth investigating beyond what's already been covered: your charge/discharge time schedules. A lot of these systems ship with time-of-use slots pre-configured that essentially force grid consumption during certain windows, regardless of your other settings. It can look baffling until you find that buried schedule screen and realise it's been quietly overriding everything else.

Worth exporting a settings report if the Sol-Ark supports it, then going through methodically rather than adjusting things piecemeal — changing one parameter at a time is the only way to know what's actually making the difference.

Good shout from everyone above. One thing worth checking that often gets overlooked — your AC input current limit. If it's set too low, the Sol-Ark throttles itself and ends up leaning on the grid to compensate rather than properly cycling the batteries. Sounds backwards but there it is.

Also, have you actually logged a full 24 hours of