Compared with other questions this seems trivial. I set the battery to discharge- full discharge- at 3000w max between 1700hrs (5pm) and 1900 hrs and it sits there showing 'idle' and letting the grid feed into the house. If i take tge schedule off it starts feeding into the house. Battery is at least 95% full
If you st a discharg period it will ONLY discharge from battery during this period and use solar/grid otherwise. It's the same concept as a charge period which will only charge from grid during the set period.
GW7872mcfarlane if you have a gen2 inverter, try setting Home Demand, rather than Full Discharge.
You should then get the house supplied Outside the times you set, and the battery forced discharging inside the time set. Different on gen1 for some reason 🙄
justpassing I have gen2 inverter and I have always wanted to schedule a full export for an hour during peak flux rates, rather than do it manually. I found out last week that scheduling via app and selecting Home Demand for an hour (rather than the more obvious choice of Full Export) does what I want. Which is, Full Export during specified period and Home Demand otherwise. If you chose Full Export, I get my Full Export (as above) but then battery goes to sleep after period ends. Ideally I would prefer to schedule a discharge for a period but also specify a battery SOC, such as 45%. Discharge completes when battery level reached or end time, whichever first. Normal battery operation then kicks in. While I’m at it, charging for a time period allows SOC level to be set but I would prefer that the charge operation completes in SOC is reached rather than only at end of period. If I set SOC to 50% and period for 1 hour, if my battery is already at say 40%, it’s gets to 50% quite quickly but then sits idle until end of period before normal operation continues. If gets to SOC level then behave in same way as you’ve got to end period. That’s what I’d prefer.
There are numerous posts about this.
After timed export neither GE or Octo R&D scheduler have the ability to kick Eco back in. I have tried both....a lot.
In the end I went Home Assistant which also has the benefit of sitting on home network and so not subject to vagaries of GE and Octo servers and the internet. It can pretty much do whatever you want it to.
I have 9.5kWhr battery and discharge for 2 hours at 15:00 which leaves me about 50% to get through to 02:00.
Dom66 The inverter doesn't seem to re-enable Eco-mode after your timed export. This has been a known issue for quite some time.
If you don't want to use HA, our free service does this for you.
Wonder Watt on my Gen 2 inverter timed export is fine and reverts back to eco-mode as long as you select Home Demand and not Full Export. During timed period there is a full export regardless of which setting you choose! But eco-mode only set if you choose Home Demand. I think I did look for your app but couldn’t find it - is it available on iOS? I then found a way it works as described above.
Wonder Watt ok, found it https://www.wonderwatt.com/
Wonder Watt I have a three-phase supply and effectively three separate systems, each of 10 x 415w panels, I x AC3.0 inverter and a 9.5kw battery, and each on one of the phases. In total that adds up to 12.45kw nominal on the PV installation and 28.5kw on the batteries. I have been having mixed experience using Octo R&D scheduling. Would I get better results using Wonder Watt and would I have to set up three accounts to achieve it? I am getting rather tired of having to deal endless with three GE portal web accounts and having to adjust each one every time I want to make a change. How might Wonder Watt work better for my setup than Octo R&D?
Dougal Hi - yeah our system currently does not cater for a multi-inverter setup. And it is not a priority for now, as there are more important features and integrations to work on at the moment.
You're right, the workaround would be to create three separate accounts at the moment. I guess you could always start with one? 😉
I use Home Assistant and a couple of automation to dump the battery down to a set level during the Flux export peak period. Essentially, I dump down to 50% and revert to ECO when complete. This has been working for several weeks - aside for the some spurious GE recalibration that rocked the boat for a day or two.
Thanks for starting this thread, I'm not sure I 100% understand how timed discharge works, I'll explain what I'm trying to do.
I have a gen 2 9.5kWh battery with panels, and I'm tryying to charge my wife's car at the off-peak time on Octopus go (00.30 until 04.30).
We have a "dumb" BP pulse charger and the car is set to charge between 00.30 and 04.30.
With the inverter set to "eco" mode then it balances the load from grid & battery as the car will charge at 7.5kWh and drain the battery down to the limit I set (10%).
That's fine at the moment as the panels will charge the battery during the day, but not good for winter time.
What I tried last night was setting the inverter to timed discharge to home demand (04.30 - 00.30) to try and preserve the charge in the battery for use in the house.during the day thinking that would prioritize the car being charged from the grid rather than balanced, but that's not what happened, the battery was heavily discharged this morning.
Based on the comment from Dom66 - that the inverter reverts to eco mode - then I'll have to think of another way to achieve this as the inverter views the charger as a home load and will balance battery & grid, even if I set a time - is that correct?
Thanks for any advice - it's just a bit unclear how it works from the guides.
Neil.
You can set your battery to timed charge for the same period you charge your car and fix your percentage to a certain target SoC. That should do the trick for you.
Neil M
In general, you either run in ECO or Time Discharge/Export and reverting form the latter to the former when done. Without automation of some sort, this is a manual process.
Is your car away from the house during the day normally? i.e. assume you're limited to night time charging? If not, maybe Intelligent Octopus (IO) would work better for you? It provides a longer off-peak window (6 hours instead of 5 on GO) and any daytime charge that Octopus schedules against your car is also off-peak AND the house is off-peak during this time as well.
I have run GO, then IO and now Flux. IO does require specific car models or specific chargers. My charger (Zappi) is not on the IO list but the Tesla is, so IO worked for me. Using Home Assistant is a big plus - I could control the Zappi and Octopus to determine when to charge the car and when to charge the battery. For IO, you set a depart time - for example, required at 05:00 at 80% charge. Or, required at 11:00 at 70% charge. Using automation, I regularly changed the target time and target SOC required which resulted in a lot of daytime off-peak electricity. This meant my bill was low, but you are limited to SEG export which is a pretty poor return.
I'm now on Flux. At the moment, I consume pretty much nothing from the grid, charge the battery and the car and export enough to pay the electricity standing charge and gas bill.
This might not be an option if you are putting lots of miles on the car - we don't so it works for us.
At the moment, I solar load the batteries up during the day and solar top up the car, then at peak Flux export, I dump the batteries down to 50% leaving enough to run the evening and overnight then repeat next day.
When winter comes, I'll switch back to IO.
@"Wonder Watt" do you have an email for me to get in touch please? Can’t see one on your website and can’t post on forum as verification email still hasn’t come through.
As some feedback I've been running this for a while now. Seems to do as promised - I've not been caught short anyway (although summer is an easy win normally, interested to see how it pans out as it gets darker)
The activity log is a nice touch so you can see why it's making the choices it does.
Date (Europe/London) Battery SOC Solar forecast (kWh)
2023-07-06 01:50:25 42 % 35.0
Keeping battery at SOC level:42% during off-peak
2023-07-05 15:57:28 100 % 6.2
Not activating export schedule, conditions not met.
2023-07-05 01:51:07 51 % 8.1
Keeping battery at SOC level:51% during off-peak
2023-07-03 23:20:57 74 % 27.2
Keeping battery at SOC level:74% during off-peak
2023-07-02 23:20:54 83 % 18.3
Keeping battery at SOC level:83% during off-peak
2023-07-01 23:20:21 63 % 20.1
Keeping battery at SOC level:63% during off-peak
2023-06-30 23:20:36 36 % 24.0
Keeping battery at SOC level:36% during off-peak
2023-06-29 23:21:00 17 % 5.0
Charge instruction set: 100% target at charge rate of 38%
2023-06-28 23:20:38 68 % 29.1
Keeping battery at SOC level:68% during off-peak
2023-06-27 23:20:48 19 % 6.7
Charge instruction set: 100% target at charge rate of 37%
2023-06-26 23:20:30 65 % 4.6
Charge instruction set: 100% target at charge rate of 18%
2023-06-25 23:20:30 4 % 29.5
Charge instruction set: 20% target at charge rate of 10%
2023-06-24 23:20:25 87 % 28.9
Keeping battery at SOC level:87% during off-peak
2023-06-23 23:20:44 81 % 17.3
Keeping battery at SOC level:81% during off-peak
2023-06-22 23:20:48 83 % 5.1
Charge instruction set: 100% target at charge rate of 10%
2023-06-21 23:20:30 74 % 26.1
Keeping battery at SOC level:74% during off-peakCapt_Rich Hopefully sorted for you now! :-)
Wonder Watt If I set up one account for one of my inverters to get on the learning curve for using Wonder Watt my question is the same. Will I get better outcomes than using Octo R&D scheduling? Is WW more effectively automated?
Dougal I can't tell you that in absolute terms, because I don't know what results you had with Octo R&D scheduling.
Plenty of people are happy with it so far. You have nothing to lose to give it a whirl for yourself though. 😉
Wonder Watt - Thanks, I'll give it a try!!
4monks - Thanks. - The car mileage isn't too high, and it's school holiday time so car not too far from the house. The car is a mini so I think it works with IO but the charger definitely doesn't (freebie when ordering the car) so might not work for us, but it's certainly good advice.
Total newbie when it comes to automation - are there any guides or articles that you could point me to?
Thanks Again.
Neil M I believe I saw BMW/Mini on the IO list. There are a number of good YT videos that will point you in the right direction. Have a look for SpeakToTheGeek in YT who is also a member of this forum I believe ( @SpeakToTheGeek ). I used a combination addons in Home Assistant (GivTCP, Octopus & MyEnergi in particular) to achieve the desired results.
Wonder Watt I am happy to give it a try on one of my inverters. Is there any point for me before you get your Agile Octopus functionality working? I have a fixed Export Revenue tariff and Agile. Looking at settings and trying to fill them makes me think it needs a bit more flexibility yet. Am I missing something?
Dougal That's fair enough, we currently don't support Octopus Agile.
It's on the roadmap though. After we build support for multiple schedules - which users really seem to want. Which is handy for Flux, but also the foundation for supporting Agile.
Wonder Watt
Great thread - signed up for wonderwatt online service, and it's all working fine to charge up batteries overnight, and export in the premium 4-7pm window, and in between back into eco mode.
I've got panels on two roof faces each 45 degrees off south, which is too complicated for the solar forecast, but putting in a SW gives me a good estimate and I can always tweak the settings to compensate.
Wonder Watt Please let me know when you are Agile ready? Since it might be a while it might be more helpful to send me an email <pv3@southparkfarm barn.co.uk>
Dougal When we do, we'll post a blog post link on our Twitter, cheers!