Octopus Flux pre peak top up

I was trying to get my battery to top up on Octopus between 2 and 4pm before the price rises each day at 4 -7pm so I have enough to see me through on days when generation is poor. I fully charge between 2 and 5am. I set it to charge to max 50% thinking it would carry on generating if it was still above 50%, however even if the battery is still at anything over 50% it puts the battery on idle and draws from the mains instead of the panels therefore losing any generation. I tried to call GivEnergy but they only do online chat, what a joke that was! It took me an hour of waiting ages for each response to be answered, to finally get told to speak to Octopus as Give couldn't help or just adjust it manually every day (because we all have the time and inclination to do that on an automated system).
Has anyone any ideas on how I can get the system to do what I need via alternative settings? Surely a simple charge if below 50% (or whatever) setting option could be easily added to solve the problem.
New to this so any help appreciated.

Pro
I have just this system and requirement.

I get a charge to 100% in the 0200-0500 period. My understanding is that once it reaches 100% (or whatever) the grid will continue to supply the home until 0500.

At 1430 I do a top up charge at standard rate which usually takes me through the high tariff period.

I have a Gen 1 inverter that will not do this automatically.

I use Myenergyoptimiser.co.uk to set the charge periods.

_ I set it to charge to max 50% thinking it would carry on generating if it was still above 50%, however even if the battery is still at anything over 50% it puts the battery on idle and draws from the mains instead of the panels therefore losing any generation_

Are you saying that you expected the panels or the battery to feed the home after the battery has reached 50%? I think the system will continue to draw from the Grid to avoid the battery dropping below 50%.

If the system continues to draw from the Grid after 1600 that does need to be stopped. Is that is what is happening?

Roy124 on days when the battery is at say 80% at 2pm due to generation and not using before , it still puts the battery on idle and powers house from grid. I would like in that instance for it to keep discharghing to 50% up to 4pm or charge to 50% for a bit if it dips below. It reverts to battery at 4.

Pro Got you. Is there actually a problem?

In one scenario you may have PV charge in your battery and you don't want to pay for Grid when you have free. However it is unlikely that that 80% or so will last through to 0200. After 1600 you say you get battery anyway (as you want). After that when the battery is fully discharged then you have to get power from the grid. Basically you either draw some before 1600 and less before 0200 or none before 1600 and more before 0200. At this time of year PV is hardly a factor.

I can't answer for your system, or why, but in MyEnergyOptimiser I can set a trigger value like your 50%. If the trigger is not activated then the battery/PV continue to charge. If it does charge then I can set an upper limit but it is not really necessary.

Does that make sense?

Pro what sort of system do you have. I recently discovered an interesting feature (bug?) on my gen-3 hybrid that might help.
Setting on of the timed discharge slots to a window 2pm to 4pm with a min charge of 50%, but not enabling timed export seemed to have the effect that if SoC was above 50% it would continue to operate normally, but if it was below, it would actively charge up to 50%. But this may be very specific to firmware revision.

DD I have a 6kw all in one inverter and a gateway inverter, 13.5kw battery and 23 440w panels south, east and west facing. All were bought and installed in July this year so I assume latest generation, dont know where to check. After charging the other day on grid at 2am I still had 83% battery at 4pm with no charging other than 2am-5, after sunset I still had 20% when charging started at 2am again so didnt need a top up and wasted some, another day I was down to 30% by 4pm due to foggy overcast day and had to pay peak for some 4-7 and then normal grid rate until 2am. This is when I added the extra charging time slot. I am looking for the system to to cover for both scenarios and inbetween. I set the times etc using the givenergy web app on my pc. I have applied the settings you say and will update results, fingers crossed.

Pro note that you have to use the remote-control page on the web portal to access the correct discharge limit - it has to be the one associated with the discharge slot, whereas the app tends to offer the overall reserve.

Forgive me for prompting @DD's priory advice.
Don't wait until desired set times to check.

Try your settings during standard time periods when conditions are right. In 30 minutes it will not cost much extra.

Roy124 or even better, experiment a bit: set up a time window and observe the behaviour when you set the limit high, low, and equal to the current SoC; adjust the time window to confirm that it disabled any effect, etc. Can set the charge power low so that if it does charge, it is only at a low rate.

Today it was below 50% and charged then put battery on hold, hope for sun tomorrow, or will try as you say but out for day so will try sunday.

So today it was 74% at 3pm and unfortunately went into idle, and drew from the grid, so looks like it didnt work. Any other ideas anyone?

Pro so just having a configured discharge slot causes it to go idle, regardless of the discharge limit. Can't really think of any use case for that behaviour - perhaps report it to support as a bug?

DD I followed your prior advice and created about 5 slots yesterday and noted the system behaviour - PV, Grid, Home and Battery. Charging worked as expected, discharge and export less so. I sent the results to Richard at My Energy Optimiser. He saw the need to make some tweaks to the software which should fix and anomalies.

I will do further checks later.

Roy124 Thats good, let me know when they have sorted it please. Its at 70% today at 3 so had to turn charge off manually. A charge up to X% if needed and do nothing if above then resume would be a good additional option or something along those lines

Pro My settings are:

0200-0500 are Start 0330-0500 adjust for Solar* and upper charge limit 100%
0500-1600 are Start 1430-1600 again adjust for Solar and an upper charge limit of 100%.
When it was light after 1600 with the prospect of Solar I set a lower upper limit as I might get solar in the evening too.
On three days there was an accurate guess on Solar and the charge was reduced.

As for export this is not relevant with the early nights. In summer, if there was solar late on I would have tried:
1600-1900 Set 1830-1900 discharge to 55% then revert to home demand. This was only a tentative setting for when I expected a Solar recharge after 1900.

Very simply, what I have now works as I wish as my Gen 1 Inverter only allowed one setting.

To add, Richard has modified the software and reports. You now get a simple log to confirm the success or failure of each 30 minute command.

Thanks for the info, I thought you were asking someone at Givenergy to change settings, anyone know anyone there who could help in the same way as My EO have done, I have loads of settings on the inverter but none that do as needed.

Pro there are various external agents available... Commercial offering like wonderwatt and my EO; or local options like the premium version of the android app, or API or modbus scripts running a computer that's on at the required time - Home Assistant is one popular option, but IMHO it's a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

I don't think it's reasonable for the inverter firmware to cater for all possible permutations. The firmware has a critical job of looking after the core functionality, and the more bells and whistles they add, the more they risk breaking that. (Again, just MHO.)

Pro with MYEO Richard is responsive to improvements and quick to implement. The daily log now immediately tells me that my battery boost slots worked.

DD Worth specifically calling out Predbat running within Home Assistant as a completely free option to do the kind of clever battery and solar charging and discharging optimisation that Pro is asking about.

As you say it needs ‘something’ (a PC, a NAS drive, Raspberry Pi, etc) running all the time to host the software. Running it entirely in the cloud is also an option. It gets you into the broader journey of home automation, whether you want to do that or not is another matter. Personally I use mine predominantly for the battery management and energy monitoring, which its excellent at.

When I first got my GivEnergy equipment one of the things they promoted were the smart tariffs in the GivEnergy portal that would do the legwork of smart charging for you. These have definitely fallen by the wayside although there are new beta smart tariff feature that may have promise

geoffreycoan Worth specifically calling out Predbat running within Home Assistant as a completely free option to do the kind of clever battery and solar charging and discharging optimisation that Pro is asking about.

Ah - raising the ante from sledgehammer to wrecking ball, then... As a gateway drug to more home automation :-D

As you say, that probably needs something akin to rpi4 with SSD. But for this trivial task, a first-gen RPI, or pi zero, with just SSD card should be perfectly adequate. Maybe even esp32 or Arduino. (BTW does anyone know the cost of the smallest possible cloud virtual machine on Amazon or similar? Perhaps there are free ones? I did look briefly a while back.)

Predbat could open the door to using agile, so that would definitely be a benefit.

DD Arduino. BTW does anyone know the cost of the smallest possible cloud virtual machine on Amazon or similar? Perhaps there are free ones?

AWS offer a 12 month free tier for EC2 compute resources, but there’s no totally free option unless you can code your scripts in Lambda (which could be possible) https://aws.amazon.com/free/?all-free-tier.sort-by=item.additionalFields.SortRank&all-free-tier.sort-order=asc&awsf.Free%20Tier%20Types=tier%23always-free%7Ctier%2312monthsfree&awsf.Free%20Tier%20Categories=categories%23compute

Cheapest paid option for a London server on a 12 month contract is a t3 nano (512Mb memory, 3.1GHz Intel Skylake E5 2686 v5) at $0.0038 per hour or $33 a year.

https://aws.amazon.com/free/?sc_icontent=awssm-evergreen-free_tier&sc_iplace=2up&trk=ha_awssm-evergreen-free_tier&sc_ichannel=ha&sc_icampaign=evergreen-free_tier&all-free-tier.sort-by=item.additionalFields.SortRank&all-free-tier.sort-order=asc&awsf.Free%20Tier%20Types=*all&awsf.Free%20Tier%20Categories=*all

And that’s just the computing resource. You’ll need some firewall config and storage as a minimum.
You’re starting to get into the realms of paying for a service.

Other cloud providers are of course available but I’d imagine the costs are similar.

Oracle have a free cloud tier:
https://www.oracle.com/uk/cloud/free/

Although when I tried to set one up a year or so the sign up flow was borked and just went around in circles. Never tried since.

1&1 or whatever they are now (IONOS) used to have soem for £1/m to play around with.

DD rpi4 with SSD

This is what I run HAOS on. I have been running this for several years.
rpi4 4GB for just over £50 (Amazon/Pimoroni)
With SSD and any other gubbins, probably about £100.
See Speak to the Geek video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAolAvektlw&t=15s
There is also Octopus R&D labs (free) which can run with Agile.

Compare with annual cost for Wonder Watt or myEO, £60 ish?
But also potential hassle in setting up HA on a pi with Predbat .......
Good 'fun' as a hobby but you have to be willing to get your hands dirty.

Rob

I am a died in the wool Unix/Linux techie and I like to get me hands dirty a little less often than I used to. I opted for a HomeAssistant Green for less than £100. Its a turnkey appliance that has been trouble free so far and runs predbat and a lot of other stuff for me.

hoggy Whenever Oracle offer something "free" then get a solicitor to read the T&Cs. Ellison doesn't do "free" - ever.