How to - Use battery for day use - max solar to grid

Hi All, I have to confess up front that I am a newbie on the software front despite having panels and battery for 3 1/2 years. I feel the most economical way to run my system with Octopus Go and with my style of usage I think is this:

Send everything from the solar panels to the grid
Discharge anything left in the home batteries to the grid before the cheap rate kicks in
Charge the 10 kwh home batteries and car during cheap rate

I have not been able to fully set this up because either I have not been able to work it out on the app or it is not possible
The best I have been able to achieve is set up
Eco mode
Battery Discharge time of 22:00 - 00:29 (Does this block normal battery use?)

Issues with these settings is the Solar is prioritised during the day to run the house instead of the battery ( can this be reversed ?)

Appreciate any advice and tips but not too much jargon or abbreviations if possible

Thank you in advance

Gordon

You could try using the web portal rather than the app. Go into My Inverter - Remote Control and scroll down to Inverter - General - Export Power Priority. This is set by default to 'Load First' ie, house consumption, but can be changed to 'Grid First' ie, export. I've not tried it myself as I'm happy with Load First, but may be worth a try?

Have you looked at
WonderWatt https://www.wonderwatt.com/

or

Octopus labs R&D scheduler https://smart-energy.octopushome.net/sign-in

Thanks Chris, Just had a quick look. This looks like it offers a second discharge option, but there does not appear to be an opportunity to switch the battery usage ahead of the solar

Hi Steve, Thank you for the suggestion. I've looked at the Octopus Lab and it appears to be linked to use Intelligence Oct Flux so Octopus manage the charging (That's what I think after an hour of trying to log in and understand the menus!!) which is not what I'm looking for really. I feel I can maximise my return if I can just change the priority during the day to run the house on battery and send all my solar to the grid.
It seems the app is so basic , rather than a few menus where we can set up different numbered scenarios for different times of the year or weather conditions, then just a simple option to switch between the numbers as and when. Is that just wishful thinking?

Gordon

gordonm Send everything from the solar panels to the grid
Discharge anything left in the home batteries to the grid before the cheap rate kicks in
Charge the 10 kwh home batteries and car during cheap rate

Issues with these settings is the Solar is prioritised during the day to run the house instead of the battery ( can this be reversed ?)

I do much the same. I think you are overthinking the problem... However much daytime solar is consumed, that same amount is saved in the battery and available for later export.

eg suppose you generate 8kWh, and consume 4kWh. You want 4kWh to come from the battery, and export the 8kWh. And then dump the remaining 6kWh from the battery in the evening.

But if you just let it do it's thing, you consume 4kWh of the generated solar, exporting only 4kWh. But come the end of the day, you still have 10kWh in the battery, ie 4kWh extra, and can export it all in the evening. So that's still 14kWh exported in total.

gordonm Hi, I use Octopus Go and Wonder watt to run my system. I have 2 batteries totaling 27kWH and a small 3.84kWh array. I wanted a simple way of managing my system, so I setup a charge and discharge schedules on Wonder watt. I don't want to be bothered with micro managing my system on a daily basis so I was looking for some simple repetitive automation fire and forget.

Simply I have a charge schedule that fires up at 00:30 and charges the battery to 100% come what may until the end of the cheap period at 05:30 during the cheap window I have immersion heaters charging the water tank, washing and dishwashing machines running if required, these are just set on various apps that came with the devices and the Immersion is running on an Myenergi Eddi device that is programmed to put an hours worth of energy into the hot water tank each night during the cheap period. During the day I just leave the house running with ECO on. On sunny days since the charge is at 100% at 05:30 its not long before power starts to export and I just leave it that way all day long. If I had a big array I would probably pause the battery but we use a lot of power in the day running further loads of washing and the like so its just easier to leave ECO on and let the battery do its thing. In the evening I use wonder watt I created a number discharge schedules with different SOC percentages using the https://community.wonderwatt.com/d/934-wonderwatt-battery-discharge-cheat-sheet-unofficial and these discharge my batteries to the grid between 8pm and 20 after midnight ready to repeat the whole thing again the next day. So far it is working very well it's all automatic and I am making money with very little day to day hassle and effort.

Thanks DD. Lateral thinking

gordonm
Gordon
I used Octopus scheduler for a year with eco 7 tariff for import and flux for export.
There was no management by Octo
Their scheduler allows you to do set it to do what you want.
In the end though I just found HA much easier, especially when using PredBat

SteveCook I used Octopus scheduler for a year with eco 7 tariff for import and flux for export.

Didn't think you could do that..? Aren't flux import and export supposed to be used as a pair?

There was a looong period (4 years) where Octo could not get my smart meter to works after they assured me it would, so the only way I could really charge the battery off peak was Eco7 on dual rate meter (that I had to read each month) and Flux export (though maybe you are right it was a fixed export rate with some times when it was better)

SteveCook

HA , PedBat?? Sorry

HomeAssistant. It is free software that runs on a Raspberry PI and talks to your inverter and battery etc. Predbat is free software that runs inside HomeAssistant and looks at weather/sun prediction, your battery and use and your tariff and calculates the most economic way to run the system.
My Pi was free as my son gave it to me!

Take a look at some of the numerous YouTube videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPPpwTKIz7M&ab_channel=SpeaktotheGeek

This is a snapshot of one of my HA dashboards. It shows what is going on, what is predicted, the settings I have used/can change and my PV production