I have a Gen 1 3.6kW inverter, 8.2kWh battery and run a home with heat pump and an EV on the Octopus IO tariff.
When I plug my car in to get a IO schedule it sometimes gives me slots during the day, if this is the case I'd like to "boost" my home battery if it is at a low state of charge to make the most of the cheap rate while the car is charging
So, what is the best way to determine if the car is charging during the day and switching the home battery to charge?
This seems relatively easy to do with Predbat and Home Assistant based on what I have read. It will need a bit of setup but there is a lot written about it here.
I don't have a car so I can't comment specifically on the IOG setup but I know the BottleCapDave integration has sensors and Predbat supports them.
This might be of interest
The best way of detecting whether your car is charging or not and then scheduling things to happen like charging your battery is with local control such as Home Assistant and GivTCP that can talk to your inverter and BottleCapDave integration that pulls in IOG rates and slots. As mentioned predbat is capable of bringing all that together in one system.
There are cloud services that can do similar, Wonderwatt and predbat.com can both read your tariff and slot information, but without direct local access to your EV charger they’re always going to be behind the curve when Octopus change the IOG slot times.
That's exactly what I need. Thanks.
The only feature I would add would be solar prediction so that the home battery does not charge if there is likely to be enough solar generation to get the battery back to 100% for "free"
garycatt
I think that’s where Predbat would come in but I don’t have any experience of it.
However one approach is not to worry about topping up with free solar. That should happen if you’re in Eco mode and once your battery is full via IOG extra slots or solar then you would benefit from Export income assuming you’re on a tariff for that.
What charger do you have, @garycatt ?
I've a zappi and I check for the status changing to boosting. I use this to pause my 8.2 battery from discharging, but it would be just as easy to set the battery to charge instead.
When the zappi stops boosting, I re-enable discharge.