We have been advised that the optimal use of the battery in winter is to charge it overnight with economy 7 and run from the battery during the day. We have now moved provider so we have E7, but I can find no way of setting it up to charge overnight on either the app or the website.
Any advice welcomed thank you
Go to the portal beta.givenergy.cloud and click the inverter tab, click the remote control icon (looks like a cog to the left of the power off icon). Once in there you will want to set both 'AC Charge 1 Start and End' Times to match your Economy 7 period. Next you need to enable 'AC Charge Enable'. You can set what % you want to charge to (won't always be 100% for days like we've had this week with decent sun) by setting 'AC Charge Upper % Limit' and enabling 'Enable AC Charge Upper % Limit' (although there seems to be a bug with this which I've reported to GE support where it is just going to 100% each day).
Hi Marksykes. We have just installed a 17 panel solar system with 2 9.5kw batteries and have economy 7. It has taken me a few days to work out an initial overnight charging pattern which seems to work for us. I set the batteries to charge from 00:30am to 07:30am up to max 50% capacity. We from 7.30am to noon deplete the batteries by about 12% and in the afternoon, evening by another 25-30%. If the sun shines, by 9am it is starting to generate solar and the batteries top back up to about 90% during the day. They then run the our evening load going back down to about 65%. Then when storage heaters come on at 00:30am it dumps the rest of the battery capacity down to them first before drawing on night rate grid to take over and maintain the batteries also at 50%. I am sure come the spring/summer I will have to change that as we should be generating a lot more electricity. It really is trial and error as probably everyone's system and electricity needs are different.
I luckily have not seen the bug which chris_p mentions about the charge limit staying at 100%. That did happen one night but I think it probably takes a few days for a new system to settle in and the installer to be fair did say, you can get some random actions for the first few days. Mine has worked flawlessly since.
Join this thread of others affected by our issue if you find it doesn't respect the % charge setting: https://community.givenergy.cloud/d/1532-inverter-battery-timed-charge-being-ignored
I am with Octopus with a Smets2 smart meter.
I have applied to Octopus to change my tariff to their one with Eco7.
They have said they can change the meter to deal with Eco7 remotely and not have to physically install/change the meter.
Is this correct?
Another way to get to the timed charge is to click on the inverter tab on the portal. You will see a lot of tabs along the top - general, system etc - click on the one that says "settings". It will give you 4 options - ECO, Timed Charge, Timed Discharge and Battery. Make sure ECO is set to "Enable", Click on the Timed Charge, and input your times into the start and stop time. The portal uses a 24 hr clock (if you use the App it uses a 12 hour clock and you have to select am or pm which can be a bit confusing). There is also a slider that lets you say what % you want the battery to charge to. Press "submit" and you should see a banner at the bottom to say your settings have been changed.
You can set your timed charge on the app, but people say it isn't as reliable.
For cloudy days with no sun you may want to charge to 100%. On a nice sunny day like today I've set it to 80% and will use the iboost to mop up the excess by heating water. You can vary the amount you charge according to the weather and the time of year. As we move towards spring the days get longer and there is more potential to charge from the sun, you can reduce ovenight charging - in the summer you don't need it at all. . A lot depends on how much energy you use during the day, as you don't want to be paying Eco 7 peak rate in the evening, so its better to have more charge in the battery than you need, rather than not enough.
SteveCook as long as the meter is sending half hourly data back to Octopus you can be on E7 without having to have the meter changed. It's just a change their end
SteveCook They have said they can change the meter to deal with Eco7 remotely and not have to physically install/change the meter.
Is this correct?
Ours was changed from single rate to Economy 7 a few weeks back remotely, think it needs a SMETS2 smart meter to do it - not 100% certain on that but it sure can be done.
Karen
Thanks, I set all those up on the portal, but am confused as there is a tariff automation tab on the phone app for "solar & battery" for what appears specifically for Eco7, but when I set that, Eco, timed charge and timed discharge all still stayed as "enabled"
SteveCook
Myself and at least one other found that Octopus did not set the meter correctly and were charging all consumption at the day rate. I luckily noticed that the bill varied too far from the givenergy monthly report.
I had to download the smart meter data and use spreadsheet additions to show them,
it took far far too long to sort out and one customer service person after another failed to give me updates they promised.
they did evenyualy refund the difference but i am still waiting for the API key to be corrected.
Check your bills.
positor1
We have also just switched to Octopus E7, and just like you experienced, they do not seem to be charging the correct number of units to the day and night rates. I have raised this with them, but fully expect it to take a while to get resolved. Luckily their own downloadable meter data shows when we used the units, so the evidence is all there. It seems that Octopus is struggling badly at the moment (almost as much as GE), what with the new Bulb customers.
I have a feeling that they have not yet made any changes to my meter, but in theory they don't need this to happen, as they can see the number of units used in each 30 minute slot.
Karen That's helpful thank you.
Somehwere while I was setting that I must have hit another button, because the battery fully charged from the sun yesterday, but wouldn't discharge last night! I ended up using the oven and paying daytime rate with a fully charged battery. Not the plan!!!
Any idea what I might have done
Marksykes Not worth trying to work out what you have done. Just go back to first principles:
Reset to defaults
Set ECO enabled
Set charge period if you have a cheap tariff period.
chris_p think it needs a SMETS2 smart meter
Almost... I think rather "it doesn't work with a SMETS1 meter" is more correct. I.e. it works fine with a "SMETS1-Secure" but not a classic "SMETS1".
Octopus SMETS1 Secure description
If anyone has some technical details, I'd be interested to learn.