Is there a way to send all solar generation to the grid? I’d like to run exclusively from the battery.
I’ve looked through the app settings (and the cloud settings) and can’t see an obvious answer.
Why? Because Octopus will give me 15p/kwh and I can buy it overnight at 7.5p/kwh.
Thanks
Fill your battery to 100% during your cheap rate. There won't be much room for the solar when the battery is almost full. It'll be used by the house and exported.
Solar should generally be used to power the house rather than the battery when left in eco mode and anything spare will go to the battery first and the grid after.
You could of course play around with charge settings to stop the battery charging or slow it down (can be useful if the solar might be clipped during peak output).
If you really want to have full control, explore home assistant and GivTCP where you can automate various things based on various conditions.
Also don't forget that converting to/from AC is lossy - so you won't get exactly 15p - 7.5p. If it's charging from solar, great. Although that obviously depends on whether it's an AC connected GivEnergy inverter (which would be DC from panels to AC in house to DC in battery back to AC when you want to use it) or GivEnergy hybrid (where it's converted to AC when you need to use it in the house or export it).
Then with timed charge from grid it is obviously AC to DC (battery) to AC (to use it). Perhaps around 20% loss across that operation.
TX200
Thank you for your detailed reply. I’m still learning and there are lots of nuances to being as efficient as possible.
I will investigate the third party solutions with the givenergy api as you suggested.
I was hoping there would be a setting to make it easy to do. I’ve played with the battery discharge settings but that just dumps my entire battery back to the grid which isn’t what I want, especially as you say there are conversion losses.
It just seems to me that it would be logical to run my house from the battery (as I fill it to 100% overnight) and it generally lasts the entire day, then let the grid have all the solar generation since that’s more economical.
Maybe I’m wrong.
Just for posterity, this community has been the best resource since getting my panels and battery setup. Thank you.
J.
Don't forget to Google GivEnergy KB site too
Various documents on there.
This may differ depending which inverter you have, but if you have the Gen 1 hybrid inverter, setting timed discharge mode (not timed export) with eco mode enabled does this like you described.
All solar goes to the grid and none to the battery.
Battery feeds house load but never charges.
It should charge overnight if you have the timed charge mode enabled still.
for example do:
I understand this is not the same behavior on G2/G3 hybrids though.
Set a low battery charge/discharge level?
LordHippos
Your reply is appreciated.
Unfortunately (or not) I have gen 3 and those are the exact settings I have.
Ho hum. I’ll keep looking at the KB.
Thanks all.
Purk If you have the "PAUSE BATTERY" button on the Web Portal pages for your inverter, you can simply set it to PAUSE CHARGE during the daytime hours. See under MY INVERTERS and then the "cogwheel button" to open the detailed inverter settings.