I’ve just had 20 solar panels installed along with a battery and inverter. I’m trying to decide which Octopus tariff to sŵitch to - Flux or Intelligent Flux. So I thought I’d test out charging the battery overnight - which worked fine. BUT now the battery is discharging straight away? I set up a discharge schedule for 4-7pm, but it seems to ignore that? Help / advice please.
You need to disable Eco mode I believe
USL solar user for some reason the inverters tend to ignore timed discharge so not many of us use it leaving it in Eco mode (which discharges to demand) or use an alternative to control it (Home Assistant mainly)
You could set a timed charge from say 1am to 4pm and leave it in eco.
It'll then discharge 4pm onwards until it runs out.
You could also set a charge up to (or empty down to) percentage, say 75% maybe at the moment. It should charge to that using the grid and hover. Then any solar should take it to 100% if it's sunny.
Or go down the rabbit hole (an exciting rabbit hole!) of Home Automation! Look at Home Assistant and the videos on YouTube channel Speak to the Geek.
USL solar user Hi, welcome to the forum. You didn't say what it was you wanted your system to do. Perhaps hold charge all day until the peak period? A problem with using a scheduled discharge is that (on some systems at least), that means dump the battery at full power during that window, even if the mode is "home demand". That may or may not be what you want (given that export pays a premium rate during that time).
Do you want to fully charge overnight, or leave space in the battery for any solar? (With 20 panels, you presumambly hope for a reasonable amount of solar...?)
Thanks for the replies. A few options to look at. At the moment I’m assuming I will switch to octopus Flux, so best to charge up 2am-5am. Then they have a peak usage charge which is a lot higher for 4-7pm. So I wanted to use the battery then if not enough solar coming through. It seems to keep switching my settings from Scheduled to Dynamic! I keep changing it, but it doesn’t always stay on Scheduled. Just testing out options atm, as only had it for 2 full days!
USL solar user Flux isn't generally the best tariff to be on in winter.
Have a look around the forum and you'll find some threads discussing this - the Agile Rates one might be helpful
USL solar user The best strategies depend a bit on relative sizes of solar array, battery, and daily consumption. It should generally be necessary to preserve the battery for the peak period only if the consumption exceeds the battery capacity. On flux, you could also try shifting things like dishwasher / washing machine to run directly from grid during the cheap period, rather than from battery.
There's also the option of using external agents such as wonderwatt.com to add extra value to your system. I think they offer things like solar forecasting, etc. I think they are currently adding support for Agile tariff. Or if you are more enthusiastic and hands-on, you can run things like Home Assistant locally which has all sorts of plugins to do interesting things. [I use neither of these, but do run some simple scripts locally to do some automatin via the API.]
On the web portal, in the inverter section, there's a 'remote control' page - gears icon in top-right. At the bottom of that, it has a log of changes that have been applied. Maybe there's something there to indicate why mode is changing from scheduled to dynamic.
I'm brand new to GivEnergy and also trying to adjust my battery daily charge/discharge schedule for the first time. The desired outcome is simple, (1) charge battery on overnight off peak rate, (2) discharge to home during day and (3) force discharge any residual capacity prior to the next off peak period.
After adjusting Inverter Settings I also discovered the battery did not discharge during the Timed Discharge period. At the moment I THINK I've solved my use case by following this suggestion.
I also 'discovered' the Remote Control settings on the portal and have questions I hope someone can help with!
Rahul If you're reading through old posts, the most important thing to be aware of is that "timed discharge" has changed. Other than for gen-1 systems, we (users, not GE) used to recommend timed-discharge since it had the useful property of using eco mode before and after the time window, whereas timed-export turned off eco.
But GE have now reimplement things. So timed-export is now almost always what you want, and timed-discharge probably of less interest. (It's basically eco-mode within the timed window, and pause-discharge outside the timed window.) Timed export can coexist with the eco flag (they are entirely orthogonal settings), though beware that the UI does have a habit of fighting you, and randomly disabling one or the other. (On my system, adjusting the charging section seems to turn off the timed-export flag.)
Good spot. There are (at least) two different upper limits for AC charging with timer slot #1. Worse, the app sets one, but the inverter (well, my inverter, at least) uses the other one. Not very helpful.
"Misc. controls" ? "Other controls" ? Don't worry about the labels overly. Just be happy if it works.
Oh, and welcome to the forum, BTW.