Axle Energy Predbat Import support

[LeighBicknell]

I found out about Axle's scheme last night from a Garry Does Solar video. Did a quick search and found to my surprise PredBat already has support for this, which is amazing!

My question is, in the Garry Does Solar video, during the interview, Axle state they plan on doing similar events for import when the grid is overloaded. For PredBat I can only see discussion about support for export. Does PredBat have support for import events yet?

I expect the solution would be something similar to the export solution - only applying a negative cost to the import rate in PredBat instead.

[springfall2008]

Not yet, but once its live we can add it.

[mchuk]

I've set this up but I'm getting the following errors filling up the predbat logs, anyone else??

45374 | AttributeError: 'AxleAPI' o bject has no attribute 'updated_at'
45362 | 2026-03-04 18:51:46.784913: Error: Traceback (most recent call last):
45361 | 2026-03-04 18:51:46.770188: Error: AxleAPI: 'AxleAPI' object has no attribute 'updated_at'
45339 | 2026-03-04 18:51:14.713965: Completed run status Demand with Errors reported (check log)
45187 | AttributeError: 'AxleAPI' o bject has no attribute 'updated_at'
45175 | 2026-03-04 18:50:46.707312: Error: Traceback (most recent call last):
45174 | 2026-03-04 18:50:46.699121: Error: AxleAPI: 'AxleAPI' object has no attribute 'updated_at'

[mchuk]

OK I got to the bottom of this. The API key was in predbat's apps.yaml as a single entry list rather than on the same line as the api_key parameter name. That breaks things in very weird ways! I only tracked it down by hacking the local copy of the axle.py file and having it output loads of extra logging to see what was going on, and I could see it was passing the api key surrounded by [' '] !!!
Now resolved, but maybe some better error handling here might be good?

[gcoan]

glad you got it sorted

can you share what your apps.yaml entry was so we can look to improve the error logging, and can you log it as a new issue please, this is a discussion so won't get necessarily acted upon

cheers

[mchuk]

Yep, I had

  axle_api_key:
    - 'axle key redacted from here'
  

instead of

 
  axle_api_key: 'axle key redacted from here'
 

[gcoan]

raised as #3521 @mchuk

[gcoan]

@mchuk a fix to this is coming in the next release, #3256

[springfall2008]

Import is now supported but I haven't yet seen a session to test it with