Combine ECO mode and timed export

I'm on Octopus Flux with low import rates between 3-5am and high export rates between 4-7pm.
My setup is such that I only self-use about 10-15% of the generated PV. The base objective is to export as much as possible and never having to import from the grid (unless timed import to take advantage of rates 3-5am, minimal benefit - gives me 10 pennies a day with present rates...).
This simple system runs on a Gen 3, 3.6kW inverter and a 9.5Kwh Gen 2 Givenergy battery. Running on 3012 (not 3013) battery firmware, since 3013 has been giving nothing but issues. Installer and Givenergy technicians were on site a total of 8 times (!) over several months and finally decided to use the old firmware to solve the issues.

I wish to achieve the following:

a) timed charge 3-5am (optional, can live without that for now)
b) timed export (battery dump) 5-7pm
c) PV to do the following and in that order of priority:

• take care of instant home load
• charge battery
• export surplus to grid

a) and b) work fine, but as I've read here in many other posts, activating "timed export" in the GivEnergy portal automatically switches off the ECO mode. This is a very strong limitation. I can't understand why there's not a setting that allows ECO mode to work in the timeslots where you do not set a timed import or export.
My settings in the portal are:

• ECO off (automatically)
• EPS off
• timed export on
• timed charge on (to a max of 90%)
• time discharge off
• export power priority load first
• enable DC discharge on

I discovered however that there's another 2 issues:

a) since I switched on "timed export", and even with a battery of still 60% charge level, the system keeps importing energy from the grid rather than pulling it from the battery.

You can see this very clearly above where I manually temporarily switched ECO mode back on (and hence it disabled by itself timed export).

Does anybody know a workaround for this so that the load gets provided with energy from the battery rather than the grid ?

b) I want the system to charge the battery first (if any room available) and only then start exporting. That's not happening (with any settings). Only when there's PV above 3600W (limit of inverter) then, whatever is available above 3600W is used to charge battery. See below.

The red bars are the only times that the battery actually charges.

The graph below is the same for clarity but only showing export to show you that in where all the PV is actually going upto 3600W.

Is there any workaround to prevent this from happening ?

Thanks for your input and sharing in advance !

Hi JMA,
The setup should be as follows to achieve what you want:

ECO on
EPS off
Timed export off
Timed charge on
Timed discharge on (with your original times for exporting)
Export power load first
Enable DC discharge on

Stu131 Thanks Stu131. I will definitively give that a try and report back.
However, I thought that "Timed discharge" is (as described on the portal) to have the following objective "This mode will discharge your batteries to your home during a period you define". What makes you believe that switching this on would make the battery discharge to the grid ? Can you clarify please, I may be overlooking something crucial here. Thanks.

I have a similar setup to you and like you I made the mistake of setting timed export by mistake. A little research on YouTube pointed me in the right direction. I am currently on Octopus Flux and have been forced charging and discharging since beginning of September and it works perfectly with these settings.

JMA This mode will discharge your batteries to your home during a period you define

Probably just badly worded - the inverter discharges the battery on its AC output. Your domestic load will take the first cut, but anything over and above that will go out onto the grid, since it has to go somewhere, and there's nowhere else for it to go.

I ran my Gen1 Hy5.0 with 9.5 battery fine on Octo R&D scheduler on 2012.
When I went to 2013 I could not get Eco to kick back in after forced export, though at the time I did not put two and two together as the update was not 100% smooth and I was playing with other things like EM115 wiring and EPS.

I also suffered times when Octo R&D servers appeared not to issue the command to GE servers and/or GE servers did not pass the signal on, and/or the internet somehow stopped the signal, so I went to HA.

Stu131
Hi Stu131,

Interesting. Unfortunately using exactly the settings you described above (basically ECO on, timed discharge on in the evening), things have gotten worse and my battery does not even charge anymore during the day with full PV power unless (same issue again) PV goes above 3600W (limit of inverter) Inverter sends all PV load directly to grid and the tiny bit over to battery, but that makes the battery go up from 6% to 8% and then it drops back down.

You can see above where the battery load goes negative and the PV is capped at 3600W.

Below you see in the same time period what the battery was doing. (full day otherwise you can't read the scales).

I've now switched off timed discharge as well and left everything on ECO only and only now the battery is starting the charge with the PV power available (I made that switch at 14:54 today - see below):

This resulted (as should) in stopping all PV exporting directly to grid and PV going into charging battery.

Another very strange thing happened. After the forced discharge yesterday (which brought the battery down so far), the battery started charging by itself (with 0 grid import and 0 PV - night time) - that's completely impossible, but that's what I see (and my Octopus portal confirms there was no import from grid...). The battery was at 5%, then went all the way back up to 17%. See below. I can proof with all the logsheets I have that there was no power available to charge the battery.

This proves to me that the BMS is not reliable. It is reporting things that are physically impossible.

Anyway. I would like to find out more about your settings. If you got the ECO + timed discharge working, then I should be able to get it working too, but there must still be something different in our settings. Can we exchange more details if you don't mind (I can make a list of all my settings) to see where the differences are ?

Thanks

Stu131

The graph below shows the impact of basically ONLY ONE ACTION, which is switching off "timed charge" and leaving ECO on. I did that just before 15:00 today as per post above.
No PV to grid and everything to battery. Battery is already at 30% now...
Timed charge was on from 17-18 only. It absolutely does not make sense that just this one setting would change the behaviour on battery charging vs export to grid any other time of the day (when ECO is already on and battery is at 6%...).

Stu131

After been able to charge the battery to 38% on PV by resetting everything and ONLY having ECO on, I then left ECO on and added a timed discharge from 17:30 to 18:00 and indeed the battery started discharging to the grid, see below.
But that does not solve why the battery does NOT charge during the day when both these settings are on.

JMA
correction to the above (typo) in my post 7: switching off "timed DISCHARGE" not charge of course.

Hi JMA,
No problem, perhaps a place to start is me showing you my setup on the mobile app. I make basic changes here without any issues. Have a look and see if there are any differences.

Stu131

Something that is often overlooked and does affect your system overall.

Gen 1 Charge from Grid Only / Discharge from Battery Only = 2.6kw
Gen 2/3 Charge from Grid Only / Discharge from Battery Only = 3.6kw

During your 2 hour cheap window 3-5am you can only charge your battery with a Gen 1 by 5.2kWh (2.6kw x 2hrs), Gen2/3 by 7.2kWh (3.6kw x 2hrs)

The same limitations apply for powering your house from battery only (when no solar).

Your Gen 1 is limited to 2.6kw. So if your house uses 4kw then 2.6kw comes from battery, 1.4kw from grid import etc
Your Gen 2/3 is limited to 3.6kw. So if your house uses 4kw then 3.6kw comes from battery, 0.4kw from grid import etc

Also different batteries also have different maximum charge/discharge rates (smaller are lower) - not applicable in your case having a 9.5kWh Battery,

dragon2905

Thanks Dragon 2905. My setup (see post 1 in this chain) is a gen 3, 3.6kWh inverter with a 9.5kWh gen 2 battery. My installation does not have a gen 1.
I have tried out all permutations of settings over the last few days and documented them and the conclusion is crystal clear:

• the battery does not charge at all unless the system settings in the portal are in default and with ECO mode on (only).
• as soon as any setting is altered (over and above to ECO on), such as timed import, timed export or timed discharge (anyone of them as standalone or combined), the battery stops charging completely and all the PV is sent to the grid rather than used to charge the battery (and all that with zero or very minimal house load - order of 150W max).
  • the system sees a "fake" power generator (there's no such thing, no EPS, no EV, no other connection) and nobody at GE (Adam is looking into it with the installer) can explain it. This happens late evening with no PV and no import from the grid (even Octopus logs show 0 consumption from grid in same period) but the battery still "charges" itself (from 6% to 17%). Impossible.

The only exception to the battery charging is when e.g. ECO is on - and timed discharge is programmed for later in the evening - is when PV exceeds 3600W. The first 3600W (limit of the gen 3 inverter) goes to export to grid and any tiny little bit of excess above 3600W is used to charge the battery (nearly never happens). All of that is clearly visible in graphs above and it is repeating itself.

As per the posts above, other users seems to have the exact same settings as I do with same setup and objective and it works for them. I cannot replicate this. Any insight is very welcome.

Is your battery outside? I am beginning to think SOC is greatly affected by the battery temperature.

Ours is inside a garage that is converted to a workshop, so is at a fairly stable temperature but it does charge itself from 6% to 7% without any power source during the night and is then able to run the house for about an hour to get back to 6% and it can do that twice.

nophead
Hi,
The installation is inside the garage in a very stable environment - dry and with pretty constant temperature (especially this time of year). The "self charge is 6% to 17% which for 9.5KWh battery requires a lot of power. That cannot be related to temperature. I don't believe at all the battery has recharged itself. I believe the BMS software is reporting something that is not real.
JMA

Yes I agree it is the BMS changing its mind about the state of charge.

This morning at 6:50, as soon as the PV cells were generating one watt, my system suddenly decided it had 2% more battery charge, which would be 80W hours. That managed to run the load of the house, which was about 200W for 3/4 of an hour., which is 150W hours. The temperature in my garage dropped a couple of degrees over night and the battery discharged to 5% and shut off an hour earlier. I can't think what else has changed unless batteries recover some charge like electrolytic capacitors can.

Stu131
Thank you Stu 131.
Unfortunately my phone has regional settings (North America) which are such that I'm not able to download the app from the app store and I'm therefore limited to work with the GivEnergy webportal, but the settings are the same with the exception of the definition of "charge mode".
I've been further documenting all the combinations of settings over the last few days and found that one day the battery does charge and the other one not (with exact same settings and near identical PV available and the same very limited (close to nothing - below 2.5 kWh for the entire day) house consumption). One day the battery only starts charging the moment PV exceeds 3600W (as described in detail above), the other day it starts charging with the slightest PV available.

I now have:

• ECO on
• timed charge from 4:30 to 5:00 am to a max of 15% (just enough to get through the period from 5am to sunrise if needed). Sometimes I just need that little charge from 7% or so back to 15% with the low rate to get me just through the night
• timed discharge from 4:50 to 7pm to export at peak rates (Octopus Flux)
• timed export : disabled

On a day that the system does behave the battery behaviour looks as follows:

That's really what I would like to see. However some days the battery doesn't start charging in the morning at all and remains at 8% or so with full PV power.... GE are still looking into it but have no credible explanation. The only way for me to solve that is to disable "timed charge" and "timed discharge" manually for a while, the battery then immediately charges and then I enable timed charge and discharge again after the battery is full. Very unreliable.

GE keeps writing back to me that the expected behaviour (above) can only work when "ECO is off and you have the discharge on, that discharge will essentially become an export instead".
The opposite is true and I keep demonstrating that ECO and timed discharge both need to be on to be able to export. It's like talking to a wall and I'm very frustrated that with the level of detailed proof provided by myself and the installer they keep providing answers where it shows they clearly haven't studied the data or read the actual question. (note that it's six months and counting now to get this system up and running with 8 site interventions from installer and GE combined).
The entire definition of settings in the portal is extremely poor and clearly unreliable. How can a user understand the description that comes in the portal with timed discharge: "This mode will discharge your batteries to your home during a period you define" as actually being the mode that allows you to export to the grid in a period you define (rather than to the house). Timed export is useless as it can't be combined with ECO.

GE did clarify in an email that the battery "recharge" after the 7PM discharge completes (even from 6% to 17%) is a normal "recalibration" process as suggested earlier by other in this series of posts.

Stu131 : is there any day that your battery also does not charge at all as described above ?

JMA
Hi JMA
No, I'm sorry to say as before my setup is working exactly as it should with those settings. I'm currently monitoring it from Cape Verde and still making a profit from my forced charge and discharge. I do see the battery increase power just before the charge process as you have mentioned which is a normal calibration effect but no other anomilies.