Good morning all, I have just had my system completed and am looking for advice on settings etc.I have an array of just under 6kw a hybrid 5kw inverter and an 8.2kw battery. I am currently on Octopus Go as I have a good tarrif til October this year and I run an EV. So really want to know what the best settings are for most savings .. Regards Gareth
Ok well it comes down to what are you trying to achieve?
Example if you do not want your ev to drain the battery you can set a Timed Charge (go to the inverter card, settings, timed charge) and set a timed charge to be the same as your cheaper Go rate. Set the battery % for the minimum you want your battery to keep at the end of the timed charge.
I just want to be as efficient as possible. I guess for me keeping the car on charge overnight once a week works.So I guess set the battery to top up then also ?
gareth0898 Kind of, here is my settings. I am also on Go and have an EV coming
Eco mode = enabled
Timed charge = 2130 - 0230
Battery % = 30%
Zappi = Set to schedule charge during the same period
The above prevents the EV from draining the battery in that time and gives you the option to charge the battery from the grid at cheaper rate and store it. I increase the battery % in the winter to 100% to keep bills lower. At this time of year the battery will still discharge down to 30% (my settings) during that period meaning a bit of extra solar dumped into the car.
Depending on which EV charger you will need to change some settings to prevent it draining the GivEnegy battery during the day.
gareth0898 I would agree with THALL. We are on Octopus Go and have an ev. The timed charge for us is set for 00:30 to 04:30 as that is the low rate period and it is then that the car will be charged. If you don't do this the entire charge from your battery will be dumped into the car and you will wake up to an empty battery and be importing peak rate electricity. Over winter I set the % to 100 but as the generation improves with longer days we too reduce this percentage. This means that some of the battery charge does end up in the car but that the set % is 'protected' during the period 00:30 to 04:30 with the main charging source being the grid during this period
We too have Octopus Go and an EV. 5kw Hybrid and 5.2kWh battery with 6.2kw of solar. My aim is to minimise the amount pulled from the grid. We have an EO mini Pro 2 EV charger with surplus solar captured to the car, if plugged in. This is fairly regularly as I work from home. On occasion I charge on Go 00:30 - 04:30 giving about 28ish kWh's to the car. I've put more into the car with excess solar some days! But as said, the main aim is to minimise from the grid so I have the battery set to discharge 00:00 - 23:59 save for the night where I charge the car once every couple of weeks on average. When I do this I tell the battery to not discharge between 00:30 - 04:30 as a one off. This way when not charging the car overnight, which is most of the time, the battery feeds the house needs through the night and day when solar generation is low. As others have mentioned above, when winter rolls round the tactic will be to charge the battery through the night on the cheap four hours for lower costs through the day as the battery feeds the house.
I should say we still have gas for hot water (Eddi soon!), heating and hob cooking. We have an electric oven.
We use (not including solar excess to the car) about 10-12kWh/day and pull about 0.2kWh from the grid daily (in winter this will go up as the battery isnt big enough to fulfill daily demand but wont be far off given the small amounts of solar ontop of the battery). Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Jon.
#p5844 similar here. If you're charging the EV overnight only once a week, note that the timed charge is also a timed discharge if you have more stored from the day before than the target which has been set. Also consider slow charging the EV with a granny charger on sunny days when the battery would be full quite early in the day. General rule: consume during the overnight off-peak rate in the winter and during the day on the summer, provided your generating enough to fill the battery too.
"If you don't do this the entire charge from your battery will be dumped into the car and you will wake up to an empty battery and be importing peak rate electricity. "
Not at all. If you set a charge level in the Timed Charge then the battery will exit the Timed Charge period at that level.
I set mine to about 40%, especially if the forecast is good the next day. The Timed Charge kicks in at about 10PM (cheap period starts at 8:30PM). The car charging point is set to start charging at 8:30PM and to stop at 01:30 (when the cheap period ends). Doing it this way means that if the battery is over 40% it then dumps charge into the car (along with the grid). This maximises the solar generation that charged the battery up during the day. The battery then charges to 40% for the remainder of the cheap period and exits at 40%. The house consumption will consume about 20% of the battery charge during the night until the PV panels start to generate in the morning. If there's full sun then the battery will be at 100% by about 10:30 AM.
My iBoost then starts heating the hot water, stopping power being exported to the grid. After that (assuming I am at home), I'll plug the car in and any excess generation is dumped into the car.
Doing it this way ensures that the PV panel generation is consumed as much as possible, the battery has enough to last into mid-morning should it need to, the car gets charged by excess solar and if using the grid then only at cheap periods and the battery is only charged by either solar generation or by cheap period power.
In the wintertime I will up the battery charge percentage in the Timed Charge until I need it to be at 100% when the panels aren't generating.
Personally I think that the only way that I can optimise this further is to automate the amount that the battery needs charging by looking ahead to the Solcast generation forecast. I hope that GivEnergy release this capability because i don't have the skill to set that up myself.
Zakalwe Thanks for qualifying what I meant to say. That was my intention but clearly that didn't translate to my fingers
gareth0898 We have a similar setup to you although our EV is home most days. We have a Zappi which is set to ECO+ with a minimum export of 200W for 30 seconds and 100% Minimum Green Level. With this setting and the inverters set to ECO (Mode 1), the Givenergy batteries only supply house load and the EV only charges from surplus generation that would otherwise be exported. (If you don't have a Zappi, you may be able to achieve similar configuration with your charger.)
This will change in the autumn when we will use the overnight EV charge slot to top up the EV and the house batteries, but that's not needed at the moment because of the length of days and sunny weather.