Can anyone tell me .if i change my 10.4kw battery charging time to suit my off peak cheap rate hours,when the PV panels start working will the PV be able to top up the batteries during the day as the batteries drain down OR will the batteries only ever be charged from the cheap rate.
Thanks in advance.
Tony
tonybush We had or system with battery installed yesterday. I had the exact same question and spoke to Tech Support.
In left hand bar (using new dashboard) under Systems mouse click on the INVERTER.
On the right hand side you should see Inverter then a bunch of headers:
General, Software, Notifications, Settings, System Data, PV Data, Battery Data, Grid Data, Inverter Data, Meter Data
Mouse click on SETTINGS
Now on left you will see:
ECO
TIMED CHARGE
TIMED DISCHARGE
TIMED EXPORT
BATTERY OPTIONS
RESET TO DEFAULTS
Changing any of the above settings will OVER RIDE the ECO setting which is where the Inverter decides whether to send energy to your house, your battery or to the grid. But as there will be, typically, no solar generation during the cheap rate hours (usually post midnight for 3/4/5/6hours) it is fine to over ride this setting during that period.
Mouse click on TIMED CHARGE and choose "Enabled" and set your Start and End Times to correspond with your Off Peak Tariff.
You will also need to decide how much to charge your battery from this off peak.
For example if you charge to 100% and the next day is sunny then its likely you will waste some of your solar generation - it will be exported (at a crap export rate) rather than used in your home or to charge the batteries.
Finally mouse click on the SUBMIT button to save these settings to your inverter.
Obviously you could in theory change this every day based on the forward forecast, or perhaps take a view on the time of year. During winter you are likely to have low solar generation as compared to summer so you might want to, for example, set the battery charge percentage to 90/95% in winter and 50/60% in summer.
Everyone's useage will vary depending on system size, battery size, number of occupants, house occupancy etc etc.
If you are of a technical persuasion there are more advanced "homebrew" solutions such as HomeAssistant where people have written scripts that will look at the weather forecast in your area the estimated time of sunrise/sunset and then apply a battery charge % based off of those data points.
Hope that helps.
Paul
magician2905 thanks for the explanation Paul.
However, whenever I've experimented with the 'timed export' option is seems as if enabling this function overrides the ECO setting permanently and not just for the time period specified for the 'timed export'. It appears that my battery will just sit idle until then until the timed export window and I will then be importing from the grid for my home demand.
Is this just my system or have others got it working as Paul describes above (which seems how it should logically work to me)?
Marande No, mine does the same. I've used the timed export mode for some of the frankly ridiculously high prices Octopus are paying lately and afterwards the battery just idles, either not charging from excess solar or not feeding the house.
The system needs to return to its previous setting once the timed export has finished. I've had a feature request in since July for this with no updates yet.
Cdent I have seen this as well which is irritating. Surely if I have any excess from generation it should always go to the battery by default but I constantly see Exporting happening which is odd.
Makes no sense to not be able to say if generation is more than demand and battery is not full ALWAYS send to battery.
CoyoteEnergy46 Use the 'timed discharge' setting, not the 'timed export' setting. Timed export will hold the current charge in the battery until the export begins.
mrand31 Sorry if I sound stupid here but I am not wanting any export at all if there is excess I want it all in my battery. If I mess about with discharge settings that will mean the current way it's using the battery will be worse or better?
There should be an easy option to just say any excess put to battery Unless it is at x% (100% ideally) THEN export to grid as that is most optimal.
Isn't that what Eco mode does? It will use PV generation to supply house load and charge the battery. Export will be minimised in preference to battery charging and .
How much export are you seeing? Small amounts will always happen. Also, the inverter cannot ramp up and down instantly, so you can sometimes see export until the system "catches up"
Zakalwe Thanks for the clarification. I am seeing only small amounts (10's of watts) but forgot about the ramp up and down scenario.