Restrict Discharge Rate when Octopus Intelligent Go is charging the car

I am sure someone has written about this but cant find it. I have HA running and am about to switch to Intelligent GO and aware that car charge slots can be outside of the standard 11:30 to 05:30 window. Would like to use HA to monitor and control the Home Battery Discharge rate to just cover house load, say 300w, and then revert back to 3600w when charging finished. I know I can do this manually but I've heard that slots can be changed after initially being set, don't want to stay up all night. If someone has a solution and can share YAML that would be appreciated.

Have a look at the Batpred automation which uses data from your Octopus account and allows you to choose to automatically suspend battery discharge whenever an Octopus Intelligent charging window is in effect.

IanJ that only works if you're using Octopus to control the car directly. The extra slots don't get published with the Ohme charger. PALM will work with Ohme using an external Shelly EM to monitor the charger.

Thanks for responses. I dont have Ohme, i have Myenergi Zappi.

IanJ I can’t get PredBat to stop my EV having a nibble out of my AIO battery, also on intelligent Octopus with Zappi 2. Worked with PredBat author to get all settings correct but car still takes from the battery in 30min bites until PredBat realises and charges battery again, suspect it’s an AIO bug. May well shift my CT clamp now as I can’t see the need to divert solar into the EV anymore when you have relatively high export rates 24/7. Will switch PredBat off for the winter and charge battery during entire off peak period at a low rate of charge. Will then use full battery to load shift into ASHP for part of the peak tariff period. I’ll definitely restart PredBat around April as it has been very good with lots of solar around, despite the bug.

I have an Ohme charger and am too tight to buy a Shelley energy monitor. There is no Ohme integration with Home Assistant and the Octopus integration is also no use when charging via the Ohme. I have a Nissan Leaf which is integrated into Home Assistant and shows whether the car is plugged in and (in theory) whether it is charging. Unfortunately the charging status doesn't work well enough to be of any use.

I have set up an automation that stops the battery discharging if the car is plugged in and the house load is above 3000W between 05:30 and 23:30. The battery will then be turned back on when either the car battery SOC reaches the target or the house load drops below 1400W. I've also put an NFC tag in the charger and when this is scanned it will update the plug status of the car and tell Home Assistant that the charge has started by setting the value of a toggle helper.

It works reasonably well so far. I think it would be much easier with a Zappi because I believe this can be integrated with Home Assistant so it should be easy to detect when the car is charging.

andydsmith Could you please sensd me the YAML code for your automation, I would like to do something similar.

Jon-boy I I was recently pointed to https://github.com/BottlecapDave/HomeAssistant-OctopusEnergy which, I am told, provides a sensor which tells you whether IO is active or not. From a quick look at the code, it uses Octopus's graphql api to discover the scheduled slots. (I don't have HA.)

@Jon-boy My approach: https://community.givenergy.cloud/d/2747-intelligent-octopus-battery-drain/6
This works when the charge slot is outside of the off-peak period, but doesn’t quite do what you want in that my battery pauses rather than sets a discharge limit.

Bluebeef I've done mainly in Node Red. I'll see if I can send you something.

If you can read the charge power from the charger's API, then I would simple set the battery discharge rate low until the charger is turned off.
You could also use the Octopus component, not sure if the IO Dispatching boolean works outside of the IO window or not - I am sure someone here will be able to tell you.

Thanks for suggestions. I finally managed to switch to Octopus Intelligent GO on Tuesday based on the Zappi EV charger integration. Setup only took 5 mins. I tweeted Octopus about changing my export rate from Outgoing Lite to Outgoing Fixed and they sorted that for me same evening.
I then refreshed the https://github.com/BottlecapDave/HomeAssistant-OctopusEnergy HA integration and added this to my HA dashboard.
Then I added an automation to HA which looks for a change in state of the entity "Octopus Energy Intelligent Dispatching" which is set to "on" either when its the 11:30pm to 05:30am low-rate tariff or when there is a charging session active outside of this window. When detected it lowers the Battery Discharge Rate down to 250w, just enough to cover house load, and then puts it back to 3600w when turning back to "off".

Tested it last night and car charged without issue and the house battery did not drain (other than just meeting house load). Very happy so far but early days, hopefully i no longer need to worry about house battery draining when charging EV. I can still choose to charge house battery overnight if required but not needed just to avoid drain when charging EV.

Jon-boy Is there any need to still have the battery supplying the house load as the grid will be supplying at the cheap rate during the additional session?

Bluebeef I guess you are right, I could just pause the battery rather than reducing the discharge rate.

Jon-boy yes, pause or even charge the battery whilst cheap rate!

Unless the battery was filled with solar, no point using stored energy at off peak - especially when considering round trip losses converting to dc and back.