How to getthe best out of Octopus Flux

Ron-ski said:
@HungryHippos that does sound complex, but hopefully once setup it will just work.
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It's not that bad the most annoying thing about this is this entirely relies upon the inverter being available. If the dongle isn't working in the moment it will just fail.

You can sort of workaround this by getting it to issue the change a few times, so if it's down on try #1 it may be up on try #2 or #3.

The afternoon 50% charge isn't as important either, a lot of the time I think it will act as a reserve rather than charge the battery.

These are my automations for this:

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2AM Charge:

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2PM Charge:

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7PM Eco Mode:

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GE have stated that in the near future a 2nd charge slot will be possible natively.

At that point you can just configure Charge slot 1, Charge slot 2, and Discharge slot 1 in the portal, and the only thing HA would need to do is enable Eco mode after 19:00. Should lead to more reliable behaviour long term.

I'm hoping they can also add an option to enable Eco after a discharge slot as well. Will see.

The more the inverter can do directly without any connection, the more reliable it will act.
 
Thats the bit for me is the adding the option for turning eco on and off. Other bit I want is to reduce the discharge rate in the charge slot, as I don't want to direct the house battery to the car. so i'm turning it down to like 400w overnight then upping it when I wake up. as I don't always charge the battery in the cheap window.
 
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HA can do that as well with the controls (time to run, setting to set to) but like I said, if the inverter is having a funny 5 mins it will simply not do it.

So you can sort of workaround it by doing what I did, and putting in multiple times to try it, but it means more writes to the on-board memory (which may not have unlimited writes).

This uses a local control library though so should work even if the GE portal has issues/downtime.
 
Eco mode only seems to get turned off when you do Timed Export, Timed Discharge appears to work as you expect. Battery doesn't charge from the solar instead excess solar goes to export (which is what I want, maximise any potential solar export in the peak window).

Once GE add the ability to create two charge windows, I should be able to just add them both and the timed discharge via the GUI, wouldn't even need to schedule anything in HA.
 
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HungryHippos said:
HA can do that as well with the controls (time to run, setting to set to) but like I said, if the inverter is having a funny 5 mins it will simply not do it.

So you can sort of workaround it by doing what I did, and putting in multiple times to try it, but it means more writes to the on-board memory (which may not have unlimited writes).

This uses a local control library though so should work even if the GE portal has issues/downtime.
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The GivEnergy inverter does return a value to indicate if the update was successful, so it should be possible to check that and see if the change worked and resend it if not, don't know if that is currently supported in HA but I would assume it could be updated to do that.
 
Tavis75 said:
The GivEnergy inverter does return a value to indicate if the update was successful, so it should be possible to check that and see if the change worked and resend it if not, don't know if that is currently supported in HA but I would assume it could be updated to do that.
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No error handling apparently in the HA Automations is possible.

I did check into it and you'd need a proper script to handle it, I don't mind scripting but it's not a language construct I am that familiar with, so for me multiple attempts at different times is just easier to do! :)
 
Are you all seeing half hourly readings in your flux export account? Still nothing showing in mine and OctopusWatch doesn't reflect the fact i'm exporting a significant amount.
 
Are you on flux export? not sure they'd accept manual reads for that as the rates change at different times of day.

Your smart meter should be capable of sending the export readings as well, you may need to ask Octopus why it's not doing that.
 
HungryHippos said:
Are you on flux export? not sure they'd accept manual reads for that as the rates change at different times of day.

Your smart meter should be capable of sending the export readings as well, you may need to ask Octopus why it's not doing that.
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Yeah, all moved over to flux export last week. Probably leave it until it brightens up a bit so if they haven't been collecting the data then can use some good days not poor ones as the basis.
 
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SoliD said:
Yeah, all moved over to flux export last week. Probably leave it until it brightens up a bit so if they haven't been collecting the data then can use some good days not poor ones as the basis.
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Was this working when you were on SEG etc?

My smart meter export data has been working the whole time, I knew that 4.1p/kWh was poor but I wanted the export functional so I could jump onto something else better when it came along.
 
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