On the cloud portal, I can program my invertor to charge from grid in a defined time slot, stopping when it reached an SOC I can define (i.e. ‘charge to 40%, then stop’).
I can also program the invertor to export to grid in a defined time slot, but I can’t define a minimum charge that must remain at the end. This function would be really useful to make best use of Octopus’ Flux tariff - I could export in the 1600-1900 premium export slot, but leave enough charge for me to run off battery until 0200 when the low cost charge period starts.
Correct on both parts, the Discharge SOC is coming in future firmware changes, what you can do is set your discharge rate lower than full as you know how long that will be and set it back at the end of the discharge period.
You could use Home Assistant and create a number Helper and an automation and set your own target when target is reached turn off discharge.
you could use a programming language like python and with a simple script run between 16:00 & 19:00 monitor the discharge and turn it off using the API’s
we are developing an Automation platform with all of these types of functions in them, it takes time so ultimately you could wait for that. not sure when it’s going to be ready though.
Thank you.
Using a reduced discharge rate and known time would control according to the amount of discharge made, but not by the charge remaining at the end.
I’ve explored the use of R Pi, python etc, and concluded I’ll never write a system that works like a professional one should. That said, I’d not discovered Home Assistant and will dig deeper - thanks.
Any ideas of the timescales when the Discharge SoC and Automation platform are expected to become available would be welcome.
Hi Dave, We can’t give a timeline on the automation platform yet. However we have a team actively working on it now. When we are ready, we will run a Beta on it - keep an eye open. We might also be able in the future to do this functionality via firmware (depending on your specific hardware) - again, no ETA but being actively looked at now.
Home Assistant is the best bet today to get this functionality - and is likely to remain the most flexible option to enable other, non-native functionality.
I would like to do exactly the same thing and look forward to future developments. However, I have one question on what michael said earlier “and set it back at the end of the discharge period”.
Maybe a dumb question but how would you automatically set it back ?
I am using python to control charge and discharge of the battery.
I currently calculate the time to reduce it to the planned level of 30% but I would like to set that as a target. To set the time I use DC Discharge 1 Start Time and DC Discharge 1 Stop Time, which works. So I tried DC Discharge 1 Lower SOC % Limit but when I try this it returns success: False, message: Inverter Timeout which I interpret as an invalid code. I get the codes for the messages by reading the settings for the inverter. The python is: