Circular reasoning (Rolfe's solar energy system)

Electron pawnbroking indeed. It seems that trading the stuff around is just how they all work anyway, so what's a few kWh more from a customer (or more).

Who was lying to you?
 
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I’ll dm you.
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I was thinking about that stuff about not exporting from your battery. I can't stop the battery charging during the day on the sunshine, and obviously I am going to charge it up at the cheap rate from 11.30 till 5.30, therefore the damn thing is going to spend the entire summer at almost 100%. It's at 100% during the off-peak time, and it's at 100% from dawn to dusk. Even now, going into September, it only dips to about 97% from 5.30 till sunrise, and only to about 93% from sunset till 11.30. I'm barely using it. It's forcing all my daytime usage to come from the solar rather than from the 7p/unit power stored in the battery. This is not my choice, but the system forces it on me.

In case you can get some sort of automation set up, I thought I'd let you know how I see Octopus set our battery on Intelligent Flux.

They set a target percentage for each hour, either to charge up or to discharge to.

Sometimes they set nothing and let it run in some sort of default mode (running the house and/or taking from solar).

So if you could set up an automation to aim for your preferred battery state at each hour of the day and write the settings via the API each hour it would then do exactly what you want.

Like you I've got no experience of home assistance and automation and it seems like a big investment to set it all up. But if you are that interested in optimising everything (as it is tempting to do) then it seems to be the way to go.
 
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In case you can get some sort of automation set up, I thought I'd let you know how I see Octopus set our battery on Intelligent Flux.

They set a target percentage for each hour, either to charge up or to discharge to.

Sometimes they set nothing and let it run the house or take from solar.

So if you could set up an automation to aim for your preferred battery state at each hour of the day and write the settings via the API each hour it would then do exactly what you want.
That’s not a bad way to control a system.

Like you I've got no experience of home assistance and automation and it seems like a big investment to set it all up.
It really isn’t a big investment. My system runs on an old micro pc that cost me £20. There are other devices around the house such as smart sockets etc but talking to the inverters is no additional cost and would allow all of what you’re suggesting.

But if you are that interested in optimising everything (as it is tempting to do) then it seems to be the way to go.
Agreed
 
I meant an investment of time to work out how to do it all!
Ah I see what you mean, I am time rich and cash poor so it works for me :)
Similar to Linux I guess. Some people swear by it, but most of us like to go with the easy option of Windows or Mac. Could be laziness or timidity or both!
Oddly enough, HA on PC Hardware runs on Linux!
 
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My installer was trying to get me to go on to Flux and said it could all be automated, but this really isn't what I want. I've got other things to do with my time. I want to get a setup that I can be confident isn't doing anything stupid, which really means maximising the export and not drawing power at the peak rate, and then ignore it and get on with life.

I don't mind tweaking the time of the battery discharge every so often to get the timing right relative to sunset, but beyond that, I don't intend to make a career out of it.
 
Bam Bam said this in a different thread, but it's better to move it over here.


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He noted correctly that if the house battery isn't full then the panels will generate up to 8 kW in full sun. This happens if I'm charging the car on the solar. If the battery tides the charger over when a cloud passes, then once the sun comes out the generation shoots up to the maximum the panels can do. This cant be exported, but it can and does charge the battery. This is one of the reasons I found that allowing the charger access to the house battery was advantageous. The power drawn when the cloud goes over is essentially replaced for free when the sun comes out again.

However, I can't see any way to exploit this in any other way. The suggestion of exporting some of the battery charge to allow it to charge on this "free" extra solar is too complicated for my brain to handle. I'm limited to 5 kW export. If it's a sunny day then export from the battery would have to be carefully timed for the cloudy spells, and even then it would have to be quite a cloud to let the system absorb 3.5 kW extra export. And it would all have to be done manually.

As for exporting the battery 5 pm to 7 pm, what is the house going to run on from 7 pm to 11.30 pm? This works for Flux customers, but not with Intelligent Go.

So no. I don't think this is a runner. I just put it here in case I'd missed a trick somewhere.
 
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My installer was trying to get me to go on to Flux and said it could all be automated, but this really isn't what I want. I've got other things to do with my time. I want to get a setup that I can be confident isn't doing anything stupid, which really means maximising the export and not drawing power at the peak rate, and then ignore it and get on with life.

It is very easy being on Intelligent Flux, because there are only two prices. 4pm-7pm peak and everything else. Octopus just sets it to fill up the battery or discharge at random times overnight and during the day.

But that means we don't get the benefit of cheap overnight.

Oh, to qualify for Intelligent Go and get that cheap rate!
 
Do you not have the right charger or something? I think once I have my head round it all it will be fairly simple, that is until people throw me curve-balls by saying, here have all the free power you can eat right at the moment your system is exporting 4.8 kW, or why don't you export from your battery at tea-time? Then I have to break my brain over whether this might be something beneficial or not.

I set my system to export from 9.45. The battery was at 90% when that started. I have told it to stop when there's 7% in the battery, but I'll keep an eye on it to see if that was a good guess. The idea is that if I miss the 11.30 target there is still something there to run the house for 15-20 minutes until the off-peak cuts in. Hopefully I'll leave it to its own devices, but if it's about to start drawing mains electricity too early I might have to intervene and re-assess my settings. First try, anyway. The house is only drawing 266 watts, so it won't break the bank if it does get a few minutes.
 
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Bam Bam said this in a different thread, but it's better to move it over here.

He noted correctly that if the house battery isn't full then the panels will generate up to 8 kw in full sun. This happens if I'm charging the car on the solar. If the battery tides the charger over when a cloud passes, then once the sun comes out the generation shoots up to the maximum the panels can do. This cant be exported, but it can and does charge the battery. This is one of the reasons I found that allowing the charger access to the house battery was advantageous. The power drawn when the cloud goes over is essentially replaced for free when the sun comes out again.

However, I can't see any way to exploit this in any other way. The suggestion of exporting some of the battery charge to allow it to charge on this "free" extra solar is too complicated for my brain to handle. I'm limited to 5 kw export. If it's a sunny day then export from the battery would have to be carefully timed for the cloudy spells, and even then it would have to be quite a cloud to let the system absorb 3.5 kw extra export. And it would all have to be done manually.

As for exporting the battery 5 pm to 7 pm, what is the house going to run on from 7 pm to 11.30 pm? This works for Flux customers, but not with Intelligent Go.

So no. I don't think this is a runner. I just put it here in case I'd missed a trick somewhere.
Sorry - there were various similar threads going on!

I was thinking - empty the battery a bit at, say, 1030-1130. You'd get paid for that export.

Then let it top up again from the solar, with the extra bits of solar going into the battery.

Quite a lot of extra faffing if you are updating the settings several times per day!
 
Do you not have the right charger or something? I think once I have my head round it all it will be fairly simple, that is until people throw me curve-balls by saying, here have all the free power you can eat right at the moment your system is exporting 4.8 kw, or why don't you export from your battery at tea-time? Then I have to break my brain over whether this might be something beneficial or not.

I set my system to export from 9.45. The battery was at 90% when that started. I have told it to stop when there's 7% in the battery, but I'll keep an eye on it to see if that was a good guess. The idea is that if I miss the 11.30 target there is still something there to run the house for 15-20 minutes until the off-peak cuts in. Hopefully I'll leave it to its own devices, but if it's about to start drawing mains electricity too early I might have to intervene and re-assess my settings. First try, anyway. The house is only drawing 266 watts, so it won't break the bank if it does get a few minutes.
Exactly - Givenergy EVSE not yet integrated by Octopus.

It certainly won't break the bank if you miss the target and you don't have any heating (of water or food) going on.
 
Sorry - there were various similar threads going on!

I was thinking - empty the battery a bit at, say, 1030-1130. You'd get paid for that export.

Then let it top up again from the solar, with the extra bits of solar going into the battery.

Quite a lot of extra faffing if you are updating the settings several times per day!

It's a LOT of extra faffing, and it would have to be done at times when there was fairly little solar going on, because my battery chucks almost 3.5 kW at the grid when it's exporting (if the house load is low), so anything over about 1 kW solar export at the time would simply truncate.

This one is definitely not worth the hassle. I suppose in a morning when it was very dull but forecast to be bright in the afternoon (to recharge the battery) it could be beneficial, but not at the cost of sitting over a phone fiddling with settings half the day.

My feeling is that this is about small gains being made repeatedly, which add up to a decent chunk of cash over the weeks and months. So it really has to be something that can be set up and forgotten about, at least for a week or two at a time, and run in the background. This thing with the battery export is tending to net about 50-60p a day, which isn't a lot in itself, but it actually covers the thick end of the standing charge. Might amount to £100 in a year.

But standing over the phone waiting for a day with a dull morning and a forecast sunny afternoon to gain maybe another 50p at best, no. It's the precise opposite of set it up and forget it, which is my aim with this system.
 
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Exactly - Givenergy EVSE not yet integrated by Octopus.

It certainly won't break the bank if you miss the target and you don't have any heating (of water or food) going on.

I'm just sitting watching it. It's not cold enough to need heating, which is just as well as I don't want to interfere with the experiment. (If it was really perishing I could turn on the central heating - the boiler adds a bit to the house load, but not a lot.) I'm just using this post as a handy scratch pad, nobody actually needs to read it.

The battery exported 44% in the first hour of discharge - from 9.45 to 10.45 - going from 90% to 46%. That would suggest it should export another 33% before 11.30, taking it to 13%, which is higher than I was aiming for. But that gives me some useful data to figure out how much earlier to start the discharge tomorrow. I've left the battery recharge start time till midnight, so I can see how the whole thing plays out this time, including how long the final 3% reserve I think I've left in there will run the house for.

11.30 calling, and the battery just flipped down to 16%, so a full 10% higher than I was aiming for. Discharge rate seems to have slowed a bit as the process went on. I'm just letting it go on. I have the dishwasher ready to roll, but obviously that is the point of this exercise. I don't want to have to stay up until two in the morning waiting for export to finish before I can start heavy-use appliances. I'll leave it be until first the 7% set discharge limit has been reached, and then see how long the house can run for on that before it reaches for mains power. Then I can just shove the whole thing back by however many minutes after 11.30 the 7% protected limit is reached.

Oh, silly me, mistaken again. I did change the timings of the switchover so that the discharge was allowed to go on until 11.45, then the battery wouldn't start to recharge until midnight. Sure I did. But I must have forgotten to hit "submit", because the thing was still set to stop discharging at 11.30 and start charging at 11.31. That was where I had set it before I re-thought the plan after reading John's tweet. So I lost about six minutes of exporting time, and actually made this worse by having five minutes of import in there. Timings shot to hell and the dishwasher will have to wait.

Back on track now, but it won't be as simple as just shifting the time back, and the export might even straddle midnight again, which is a pain as regards visualising the graph.

11.55 calling, and that was weird. The battery hit 8%, then 7% - and went on discharging. I checked the settings, and I had told it to stop discharging at 7%, and that was enabled, but it didn't actually do it. Instead it went right on down to 5%, and flipped immediately to idle and let the mains take over running the house. So the part of the experiment to see whether I had 15-20 minutes house base load left in the battery once it stopped discharging has been a miserable failure and I have no idea why.

Nevertheless, my feeling is that I started about 15 minutes too late with the export. If tonight was representative, I should have started about 9.30 as opposed to 9.45. (Actually I do have a vague memory of thinking at one time that it was taking two hours to discharge so I don't know when that got edited to a shorter time.) So maybe start at 9.30 tomorrow and tell the bloody thing only to discharge to 10%, just to see what happens.

For the record. Discharge set to start at 9.30 (stop time has been entered as 11.59 but it should be done before then). Discharge to 10% this time. Charging set to start at midnight. Roll on tomorrow, third time lucky.

Now I should simply start the dishwasher and go to bed.
 
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Well, I was a bit late to that party. It'll be fine once the system is set up though.

A lot of the problem is that the kit seems to have been designed for people on feed-in tariffs. If you have a separate export tariff the advantage flips the other way and then you have to beat the kit into submission to do what you want it to do.
 
Scratch pad time again. It was a very good day for solar, with only three noticeable clouds passing over, and a few wisps. Total generation was 41.22 kWh and of that 37.06 kWh was exported. 3.94 kWh went directly to the house and 0.22 kWh to the battery. So, 4.16 kWh export was lost because the house and the battery insist on grabbing it, and this was a low-use day because I was out in the garden for most of it and then out at the village hall in the evening. I think all I did bar have the radio on was boil the kettle three times.

So now it's time to export that 4.16 kWh and then some.

The home battery was still at 96% when the export started at 9.30. A combination of a bright evening and me being out until after nine meaning that it didn't start to drain at all till about 6.30 and then only slowly so that it didn't drop below 100% till 8.30. It's set up properly this time so I should be able to see what it does.

The battery has dropped 10% in the first 15 minutes, which would suggest that it should drop by 80% in the two hours before 11.30, which would still leave it at 16% - and yesterday the discharge seemed to slow a bit as it emptied, so it might be even higher. Looks like I might still have started too early. In the second 15 minutes it dropped 11%, and 10% in the third. Down to 54% after an hour.

OK, that was a bit annoying because the app was only giving me 5-minute updates from the cloud rather than the 10-second updates it usually does in home mode. However, I got some data. The battery was at 11% at 11.30, so the discharge didn't slow down at all this evening. Very soon afterwards it reached 10% and stopped discharging. Completely. Although the main battery tab was set to discharge to 4%, when the export discharge was set to 10% it stopped entirely, not powering the house with the remainder. Bugger.

So I moved the tab and exported the rest, down to 5%, because why not. That was the only intervention I made. The discharge was still going at 11.30 so no peak-rate power was drawn. But there doesn't seem to be any point in stopping it before 4%, because it'll just flip over to mains power regardless of how much is left. The battery reached 5% at 11.5 then shut itself off, letting the mains take over again until it started to recharge as instructed at midnight.

So that was basically a success. I got the start time about right, but if the battery had been lower at 9.30, because dusk had come early or because I'd used more power in the house after dusk, it would probably have got to the bottom of the well before 11.30. It really is a bugger that setting the export discharge limit stops it discharging entirely, because that was a really good idea while it lasted.

It will be interesting to see how much I managed to export. More than the solar I didn't get to export earlier, that's for sure. Also, I'll leave it as it is for tomorrow evening but let it discharge fully in one run because there's no benefit in not doing that. And see how much peak-rate power it ends up taking. This isn't as easy as I thought it might be.
 
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This is just horrible. After yesterday's wall to wall sunshine and 41 kwh generation, autumn is here with a vengeance. I've cancelled my plans for a road trip up north this week. My panels have generated a whopping 3.4 kwh so far today and it's nearly three in the afternoon. There is barely enough solar gain to make the conservatory habitable with a sweatshirt on, and I just turned on the central heating.

Yesterday I exported 44.5 kwh, 37.1 kwh from the solar and 7.4 from the battery. So I made 59.2p by discharging the battery (at 8p/kwh, the difference between exporting it at 15p and recharging it at 7p). That's a respectable percentage of the daily standing charge which is 61.25p. I guess that's about the maximum I'm likely to export from the battery as I took it from 96% down to 5%. As the battery has to support the house from dusk to the start of export (indeed during the export too), it's unlikely to start much higher - even in June it was often at 96% by 9.30. Maybe I might make the standing charge on a sunny midsummer day.

I'm still being slow on the uptake here, going from one extreme to the other, when I should be looking for a compromise. The aim is to have the battery finish discharging as soon as is reasonably possible after 11.30, because it's wasteful after that time to have the house running on the battery (as it will while it's discharging) rather than from the mains. On the other hand this doesn't make much difference if it's only the house base load we're talking about. Even if the base load was as high as 500 watts (say with lights and TV on, and the central heating boiler running), then half an hour of that is a loss of a whole 2p. Dearie me.

The issue is when heavier load appliances come into play. I don't want to wait up really late to turn on the washing machine and the dishwasher, but these need to stay off until the battery has discharged. So I really want it finished before midnight. So while 9.30 worked yesterday it doesn't need to be that tight, and if the battery had started lower than 96% it might have finished too early. Ten was a bit early though. Perhaps 9.45 was right after all, if I hadn't bodged-up the settings.

Today is cold and dull, so the house is likely to use significantly more battery after dusk, particularly as it's also running the central heating boiler. I'm going to try for a 9.45 start and not bodge up the settings this time. All I have to do is make sure that no heavy-duty items get turned on before the discharge is complete.
 
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