Multiple battery charging slots

I am on the cosy octopus tariff and wish to set my inverter to charge my battery fully during the 2 cheap slots of 4-7am AND 1-4pm as the Air Source Heat Pump will drain the battery in a 24 hour period when not sunny. However I can only find a way to set it up to charge for a single slot.

Is there any way to set it up to charge by solar for all periods except the 2 cheap slots above and charge by solar and grid in BOTH cheap slots. Setting it for one is easy and works but I can be tied to having to manually change these twice a day or manually force a charge every afternoon

Please help

The crest you cant currently do it with the GivEnergy portal or app. Multiple charging slots are in development but not yet available.

If you want to automatically do this you’ll need something external like octopus r&d, wonder watt or home assistant. Plenty of other posts on these on the forum

geoffreycoan thanks, I did search but couldn’t find anything similar, all seemed to be associated with EV charging. I’ll look out some of those app names you refer to to see what I can achieve.

Still seems strange that you can programme 2 discharging but not 2 charging cycles, wouldn’t have thought that too difficult to build into the app and I’m sure I’m not alone in wanting it - come on GE

The crest wonder watt and octopus r&d are both websites that you enrol on, give them an api key for your GivEnergy account and they then control your battery charge and discharge.
Both are free.

Home assistant is an open source automation platform. Runs on a raspberry pi or any spare computer. Automates all your home or as much or as little as you want.

I went down the HA route but any would work fine for your automation needs

geoffreycoan any of these able to pick up on extra io sessions that they may send out during the day?

Hook Home assistant definitely yes because if you are using predbat to manage your charging it runs every 5 minutes and pulls the latest octopus rates from the API and recalculates the best charge and discharge activities including current battery state of charge and predicted load.

It is a learning curve to set it up but very powerful

I don’t know how often the others recalculate, sorry

geoffreycoan PALM also works with the extra IO slots and an Ohme charger (requires a Shelly EM power monitor). With the Ohme charger, the extra slots are not published by Octopus and only apply if actively charging.

stevelewis is that specific in PALM controlling the Ohme EV charger for the extra low rate slots to charge an EV, or does it take advantage of those slots in also charging the battery ?

I don't know if this detects cheap slots on tariffs other than intelligent, but I set it up yesterday and it detects cheap slots and enables charging from the grid and then disables it again when it ends. Just install and set up two automations. You could try messaging the developer. They're on the Home Assistant forum here.

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/octopus-energy-intelligent-tariff/418680

geoffreycoan PALM doesn't control Ohme, it monitors and can then either pause or force charge the battery for each active 30-minute slot.

WillC this won't work with an Ohme charger.

geoffreycoan
Sorry if I have misunderstood the point. I have a gen 3 inverter and that does seem to support 10 x charge and discharging schedules:

Squid that's true for Gen 3, earlier models only have a single charging slot.

Squid yes this is new functionality. I don’t know to what extent it’s fully there and working. Don’t think the app is accepting more than 1 slot.

But try it on the portal and see what happens.

I have gen 1 hybrid inverters, on the portal I only see 1 charge and discharge slot, but in givtcp in home assistant I see 1 charge and 2 discharge slots 🤷‍♂️

geoffreycoan
As you say the app will just show 1 slot and it seems the latest one. The functionality is there - I set up 2 charging slots via the portal both of which worked at the appropriate times and to the correct SoC.

Have a gen1 hybrid inverter here as well and would also really like to be able to add a second charge time period for the battery as have two off peak periods on the tariff I have. I really hope this is made available as our gen1 was only installed in July.

woodpecker
Try Octo R&D scheduler, Wonderwatt or for max flexibility Home Assistant

Thank you for the suggestions, I am still hoping that Givenergy will add the ability for a second charge window in the My Inverter app for gen1 hybrid inverters as this is far the simplest enabler and I don't want to have more applications to deal with.

The crest
I read the following article on "X" but I have gen 3 and don't see multiple charge time on
My system is there an update for this
Q: What’s the status with multiple charging slots?
We’ve now rolled out multiple charging slots for our newest technology. So, the All in One (AIO) and Gen 3 hybrid inverters now offer up to 10 charging slots per day. This can be managed from the portal.

Currently, this is a feature limited to the AIO and Gen 3 products, due to limited memory on the older kit.

John348 I think the multiple slots feature is only on the portal not the app

Other gen 3 users have reported seeing the extra slots so I believe the announcement

I have a Gen 1 and would also like to have 2 or even 3 charge slots. I have just started using Home Assistant, but it seems to be limited if your using agile tariff. I have found a scheduler that allows you to set times, but again it's limited to 1 charge and 2 discharge. Its a shame you cant set the slots to charge or discharge when you set the time.
If anyone has advice on agile and HA would be grateful.

I have the AIO setup and no solar (not permitted sadly) My tariff is E10 (EDF charge it as E7 8,57/39.91p so three charging slots available at the low rate (Night afternoon and evening) I initially set this up using Rich Russell's android app but this can now be done via the GivE portal. (It all worked fine until yesterday but sadly for unknown reasons it's been very unreliable in the last 24 hours- possibly WiFi issues or Grid voltage?)

Wavy Davy if you're on Agile, you need the Predbat plugin to HA.

Warekiwi I spoke too soon! After months of perfectly working it all went "belly-up" yesterday and now refuses to make the changes between load source from battery and grid! So far nothing GivE have done seems to fix it so I have a very expensive and non-working box sitting downstairs. For example a charging slot is set between 1315 and 1600h. It's now 1400 and the battery is discharging to the house and no charging is occurring. I've rebooted the inverter but nothing changed. From the reports of AIO problems on the FB group it seems that there are related problems with many other installations throughout the UK!

stevelewis Thanks for response will look into it.

Wavy Davy as @stevelewis says, predbat is your answer. It’ll automatically charge your battery based on historical house load, solar forecast and agile rates

Follow the readme and watch the setup videos Trefor has created.

I’m using it right now

geoffreycoan As I have no solar (sadly) I suspect that "predbat" would over complicate matters? (Open to discussion) My needs are fairly simple- basically to avoid any use of "expensive power" and maximise consumption on the 10 hours of cheap rate. (EDF Economy 10- via non-smart meter -as converting to a smart meter would revert me to Economy 7) My house is completely electric (heating and hot water) on dedicated supply. What with charging my Tesla it means that my peak consumption can get close to the 100A mains fuse limit at night so I do reduce the AIO charging below its 6kW max. Until some recent problems (now sorted thanks to Paul L at GivE) my electricity was all taken at the LOW rate of about 9p/kwh avoiding the 40p "day" rate!

agree predbat is complicated and sophisticated, but it will work even if you don't have any solar and will optimise your charging to make best use of the agile slots, working out how much you need to charge to support the house load, car charging etc

Couple of useful addon's I mention on this post to visualise agile rates in HA https://community.givenergy.cloud/d/3355-agile-and-octopus-energy-in-ha/3

geoffreycoan Looks like a forthcoming mid-winter project- but as ALL my electricity is charged at about 9p/kwh (as long as the AIO works properly!) the question is would predbat significantly improve on this??

Warekiwi if you are on a standard off-peak tariff without generation, simply set a single overnight charge for the full duration of your off-peak period to 100% and leave it to do its thing. I suggested Predbat for use with Agile. PALM works with E7/IO/Go/Cosy and solar.

Warekiwi predbat as @stevelewis says is particularly good with battery optimisation for complex tariffs like Agile. Both it and PALM work as well with simpler time of day tariffs like Economy 7, Flux, etc

Whether predbat or anything else is going to add value depends on your personal circumstances a bit. If for instance you get a poor (or no) export rate then not fully charging the battery depending on next day's solar prediction would be worthwhile, or if your battery isn't sufficient to see you through a whole day and you need a topup at some point, optimising when to do this based on solar and house load would be worthwhile.