On the new settings dashboard, can I ask what seems a sensible setting on the Battery Options tab? I have set my reserve to 33% but might it be safe to go lower? I've also set my discharge and charge settings to be full power (we don't have an EV... Just have fairly standard home (low) use patterns. Image attached, I hope.
Also I think I've set it to discharge to grid during peak tariff time, leaving us enough to get through the night on battery in the export settings. Is that what others are doing?
G
#2geoffreycoan
FennersFolk It all depends what tariff you are on and what your overnight usage is.
I’m guessing you are on something like Octopus Flux and your question is about what level to discharge the battery down to in the peak period?
Firstly do not use the battery reserve for this. The reserve is the amount of power to retain in the battery for use when there is a power cut. Effectively you are cutting your battery usable space down to 2/3 if you set it to this, leave it at 4%.
Secondly, you have to be very careful setting the force discharge in peak period. When you do a discharge (and export), you can specify a target battery percentage but when the battery reaches that %, it will stop discharging and any house load that’s above the amount of solar you are generating will be imported from the grid - i.e. the ‘discharge to’ is a lower limit that the battery won’t go below.
You need to instead plan your discharge so that you reach your target % for the evening/peak at about the end of the peak period. You’ll need to find this by trial and error.
And how much you want to keep for overnight usage depends on your personal consumption and battery size.
D
#3DD
FennersFolk I have set my reserve to 33% but might it be safe to go lower?
That seems extremely high. I think the reserve is typically used for people who have a lot of power cuts, and need to save some power back for that.
Mine's just to 4%
(Perhaps you were thinking that the reserve is for limiting the peak-time export to grid, so you'd have 33% left for the evening?)
What size battery do you have. Full power (2.6kW) would be stressing a 5kWh battery more than a 9kWh battery
