Flux, the lazy way

I have seen a few posts about strategies for getting through the winter, and to be honest, i don't think they work for me as i am just too lazy to fart around for a few quid, I have been on flux since Feb and for most of that period i have just let it do its own thing, with 10kw panels and 2* 9.5 kw batteries the batteries have just about maintained 100% charge at the end of each day and my account is £900 in credit. last week we had 2 consecutive days of heavy grey cloud and the batteries got down to 40% as i don't want to change tariffs for the 10 weeks a year when consumption is greater than production i have set the ac charge to come on 2-5am up to a max of 60% when the sun comes out again the batteries are above that so nothing happens, 60% is enough to get us through the day normally but i will see what happens in November/December, fairly sure i won't use up the £900 credit and its good that twe are buy power much cheaper than we were exporting it earlier in the year.

The only gotcha with that strategy is that the current GivEnergy algorithm won't change you back to the 'eco' mode once you've got to 60% and it isn't 5am yet. So it will draw power from the grid from that time to 5am.

• Pro is that the barreries will be at 60% at 5am

• Con is that you may draw a bit more from the grid than you expected.

I've been doing an 80% charge between 2 and 4 am as a test this past week. Like Spawnydave we've managed up until now just running off solar and barely imported anything. Sadly we only got on Flux at the end of August, so a bit late to really bank much credit.

Ours seems to hold at 80% once the battery has hit that level (some nights it only had to put in about 8-10% to get it back to 80%), but I don't understand the comment about not changing back to 'eco' mode. However, if it means the base load will be run from the grid for the time once the battery hits target, this isn't a big deal for us as we run at about 80 watts in the night with most stuff shut down overnight, bar the fridge/freezer kicking in occasionally.

Seems to be working well enough and on some dull days where we barely charged the battery back to 100% from solar we still got through fine. Some brighter days we'd maybe import 2-3 kWh, but then end up exporting 10+kWh so we were still up overall.

Seems easier than trying faff about changing settings on a daily basis trying to pre-empt the weather.

Assuming 5am is when your off peak ends, why would you want to power the house from the battery during off peak

There are round trip losses to convert from AC to DC and back into AC.

It would cost you more as a result.

Let the grid power the house during off peak and save what is in the battery until the peak rate starts.

mrand31 i haven't noticed that but, from what i am seeing once it stops charging it returns to eco and draws from the battery but even if that applys its only the house load of about 250w so no big deal