Had a 5.4 battery for about a month. Seemed to work fine. I was on Octopus Cosy and changed to Octopus Intellegent Flex…and everything went haywire…using more from the Grid than any day before I had the battery. I called Octopus and they disconnected my Battery from their systems. But, since then I cannot seem to get the Timed Charge to work. I know how to do it as was working fine before. I have deleted & reinstalled the app a couple of times .but nothing helps…Anybody?
First thing, you say “everything went haywire using more from the grid than any day before I had Octopus”
Its important to understand properly how Octopus Intelligent Flux works. You hand over control of your battery and inverter to Octopus and they will charge and discharge it based on grid demand. In return you get the same rate for import and export so you can treat the grid as a giant lossless virtual battery. What you export you get paid the same as what it costs you to import, whereas when you store solar in your battery and then discharge it later into your home (or export it), the conversion in and out of the battery and from DC toAC will loose about 20%. So using the grid more isn’t necessarily a bad thing, its just a different tariff from what you are used to. If you generate lots of solar in the summer then its probably the best tariff to be on
As for why you can’t get timed charge to work, it could well be that Octopus still have control of your inverter. If you go into remote control in the portal do you see commands you have not initiated, especially discharging in peak rate 4-7pm?
To revoke Octopus access from your end, go into Account settings / security / manage API security and delete any tokens you see there. Then probably worth resetting your inverter to defaults and you should be back in control.
Thanks Geoffrey, I signedd up online and agreed that Octopus could take control of my battery. They said they would let me know when the transfer was made…I heard nothing…but noticed I couldn’t do anything with the battery, eg. Timed charges…all were switched off. But I was still on Cosy …Then after about 3 days, still on Cosy, I saw that I had imported over 19kwh. from the grid, this is a lot for me. I looked back, and saw only one day in January where I had imported more…the battery was not installed till mid February. When I phoned Octopus, it sounded like something had gone wrong, so he disconnected the battery and told me to try again(I’m 80 and hearing is bad)…Since then I have had problems setting Timed Charges. I have reset the settings, so fingers crossed. I went into Security, and found a few references to Octopus, no idea what they mean, but have deleted them.
Strange, changes of tariff are usually pretty instantaneous with Octopus. Wonder if you were part way through the swap, the website said Cosy but the back end sign up to OIF had already happened?
hard to tell. Anyway, make sure you delete any residual Octopus API tokens (that created in the OIF enrolment process) and hopefully all will be well now
Charged yesterday evening and early morning… plenty of Sunshine today so the Battery is full. All good. Still thinking about rejoining Intelligent Flex, as I think something went wrong last time. We use very little, before the heat pump we would use about 1700kwh per year, Hot water by LPG. We get more Sunshine down here(Penzance) than London…so we would be exporting a lot.
If you look at Tim and Kat’s Green Walk channel on YouTube, he analysed the different tariffs and proposed that if your generation is more than 1.4x your consumption then OIF is the best tariff to be on. So very much a summer tariff.
I tried to enroll last year but Octopus can’t cope with me having two inverters on the same GivEnergy account. In your case it sounds like its worthwhile
I’d say spring summer but it depends on your usage, generation and ability to export.
If you’re not hitting that 1.4 ratio in any particular month it’s not worth being on it.
Basically need to be exporting more than you import each month, the more the better.
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Had a look at those videos…think I’ll stick with Cosy…Anybody know how to input more than one Timed Charge Slot in the App?
This is identical to what is happening to us on a change to octopus. I didn’t sign control over but our battery seems to discharge to the grid after we pay for it to charge overnight. I managed to program the inverter to discharge what’s left at 1600 peak time but you have to turn eco mode off. We don’t get anything back for power to grid as this is a second separate system to one registered under the now defunct FIT. Octopus are basically taking power for nothing
Very strange…I emailed Octopus after the shenanigans, and just had a reply…they haven’t been anywhere near my Battery and they are still in the process of transferring me. They will notify me when they complete the process … I asked them to cancel the transfer.