EVCS Throttling charge power on schedule

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question

ebringas asked Feb 19, '24

EVCS Throttling charge power on schedule

Hi,

@Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) could it be possible to have a toggle button to disable the throttling the charger does when it is on schedule mode and after repeatedly reaching “Input current limit” it takes from the GX?

During the night when my tariff is lower I have this going on:

- Multiplus charging the battery at 1kw

- Car charging up to 5,75k (25 amps)

- A heat pump that from time to time kicks in to heat DHW drawing anything from 1kw (4 amps) to 5,7kw (25 amps)

So the charger dynamically adjust it charge power accordingly, but after doing it for a while it stops and sets a fixed value from which it will never try to go up from, this value gets written into the actual schedule running and so I set the schedule to have up to 25 amps and in the morning I find that same schedule scene with a value like 6 amps yesterday or 8 amps today.

Is this a bug? Or is the expected behavior? And in any case can I request to allow for this permanent throttle to be configurable?

Regarsa

evcs

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kudos50 commented · Feb 25 at 12:17 PM

Think I wrote something in node-red that may help you accomplish this. Not a great programmer but it may put you on the right track.

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Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented · Feb 19 at 09:59 PM

Let me think about it, we might have some methods to configure things

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ebringas Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented · Feb 21 at 09:37 PM

Sure, any help will be appreciated

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Modifications Space

Node Red Space

Answer 1 · 2024-02-25T01:33:29Z

ebringas answered · Feb 25 at 01:33 AM

Hi @Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) any idea to fix or mitigate this?

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Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented · Feb 25 at 11:09 AM

You can completely disable overload protection. Then, you can create your own protection mechanism in Node-red (or any other external tool) if you want.

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ebringas Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented · Feb 27 at 08:28 AM

Hi Lucian,

I don’t want to disable it, just want a regular dynamic power balancing like any other charger with this capability, this is the first charger I have that cripple the charge power permanently and I can’t see any advantage to this.

In mi case, because the heat pump is on during half an hour the keep water hot then the charger cripples the charge for the rest of the 7 hours I have with low energy tariff.

I’m sure this nodered option or any other will work but I bought this charger because it was dynamic power balance enabled and was able to interconnect with my ESS

Again, don’t get me wrong but I’m not a programmer or that much of a tech savvy and especially don’t want my house energy control to rely on some experiment made by me, while the rest es the chargers of the world with dynamic power balancing are able to do it onboard, reliable and without the user tinkering with stuff I don’t understand

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Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ ebringas commented · Feb 27 at 08:41 AM

It is not about balancing, it's about safety. Overloading the system continuously, in my opinion, is not safe. We can add this as an option, but I'm not happy with it.

And something else, for most of the vehicles starting/stopping the changing process more than 5 times during a charging session, will cause an error and charging will be disabled until you reconnect the cable. So even if we are doing as you said, it's not going to work.
What I think you should do is to increase the system power (grid and/or inverters), so when the big consumer starts, you still have more than 6A available to continue charging.

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kudos50 Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented · Feb 27 at 08:59 AM

This contradicts the auto charge feature based on solar energy. On a day with sun and clouds following each other allowing the timeout to pass every time (if battery power is enabled, otherwise it will be even worse), the amount of start stops may end up being a lot higher than 5.

A reason to consider EVSE status with amps to 0 in a "start state" as some other manufacturers do.

The effect will be even worse if contactor close is not configured correctly. It will wear the relay.

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Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ kudos50 commented · Feb 27 at 03:26 PM

What contradicts?

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kudos50 Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented · Feb 27 at 03:51 PM

This too will lead to 5+ stops and is by design.

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Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ kudos50 commented · Feb 27 at 03:55 PM

What will lead? If the system overloads 3 times, the EVCS is not going to restart

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kudos50 Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented · Feb 27 at 04:32 PM

will lead = will result in 5+

Are you saying that if evcs is set to auto and the solar excess is enough to start charging, it will never stop ?

But if it does stop charging due to clouds, it will restart but only 3 times just like overload protection does?

But if it does resume charging every time the clouds are gone, what is the difference with an overload stop from the perspective of the car. Remember, in your remark you moved away from the reasons behind overload protection and moved on to some cars not continuing their charge process if interrupted more than 5 times.

I do agree with your remark that's still best to prevent all this and never go below 6A to ensure charging can always continue. But as you said, so many users, so many use-cases.

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Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ kudos50 commented · Feb 27 at 04:45 PM

"But if it does stop charging due to clouds, it will restart but only 3 times just like overload protection does?"

No, not really, the EVCS is configured by default to use the batteries or grid when there are clouds. So it will continue charging at minimum current for a configurable period of time (if I'm not wrong 30 min) See below:

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kudos50 Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented · Feb 27 at 05:08 PM

I know the setting. But its default is only 30mins and it can be lowered and even disabled. That makes it highly likely the amount of start/stops during a cloudy day will exceed 5.

And again, what's the difference from a car perspective between stopping due to overload protection or due to using the auto feature.

Hence, contradiction. Unless you're an advanced user knowing all this stuff which is precisely the point of the user that opened this question in the last sentence.

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Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ kudos50 commented · Feb 27 at 05:18 PM

That is why we have all those features, to prevent the car from going into the protection mode.

And the difference is the overload, the system goes very close to the limits (cables, fuses, inverters etc) That's the reason we completely stop charging if it's happening often.
But I'm not sure where you are trying to go with this discussion.

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kudos50 Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented · Feb 27 at 05:53 PM

I m still focussing on the original remark of the user. The user, like me, needs load sharing in a home like most other chargers offer.

You respond to me and to other users, overload protection will provide that where it is clearly not the same thing.

Also the remark about a car stopping at 5 retries is probably only valid if the voltage is too low for too many attempts. My previous charger simply put the charge power to 0 resulting in an EVSE for the car. That's not an error and most likely will not be considered as such by a car.

We own 3 different EV's and we've had more than one night in which my wife did not communicate her plans to me causing the EVBox Elvi to drop below 6A for more than 5 times. For none of the EV's this has ever been a problem.

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ebringas Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented · Feb 27 at 11:07 PM

Hi Lucian,

I’ve 9,2kw during the night tariff I leave margin to the contract power and the max my installation can handle (wire gauge and protection wise) is 63 amps 14.4kw

My max allowed in cerbo config is 39 (1 below contract power) there is no real risk as the system overload is only to avoid going over the max contracted power.

For my use case I have both the car charging and the batteries of the ESS system, the heat pump consumes 5kw at start up during some minutes, it is like that so that peaks fall inside cheap tariff 0,03€/kw and once the regular tariff hits at 0,18€/kw the car is charged, the batteries are over 50% most of the days and the heat pump have gone over the start peak and is then at 1,2kw that my solar can handle.

I understand the safety considerations behind current behavior but that is why I asked if this could be a configurable option (might have a disclaimer also) because crippling the charge power permanently (until I manually set it back) because during some minutes the installation was using all the contracted power when it is the desired behavior is not optimal.

the power won’t go over the max, instead if the charger is set to 25amps and some other heavy consumers kicks in with 25amps + house demands 2,5 amps, the charger will just temporarily reduce charge power during the time to around 10 amps (this works perfectly and very fast reaction time) and just resume configured 25amps max charging power once that situation passes, so the car wouldn’t stop charging repeatedly either.

could you please consider this?

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Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ ebringas commented · Feb 28 at 05:55 AM

yes, if "0 amps" solution proposed by @kudos50 works, we can solve your request. I'll keep you posted

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ebringas Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented · Feb 29 at 11:48 AM

@Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff)

In any case, I think that the the overload protection (due to input current limit) shouldn't modify the scheduler field "Current (A)" as this field affects the next time the scheduler kicks in on following days, and is causing that a momentary situation sets the scheduled charge power in amps for the future.

and sorry for keep pushing this but the "0 amps" solution is in any case an improvement to how the charger handles a situation when the available charge power in amps is below the minimum charge limit, it is a different issue:

- Scenario 1:Max input limit 40a - the charger dynamically alters the charge current between the max charge and min charge limits (configured in the charger) unless it is less that 6a when it will need then to stop the charge (here it should have a dwell period to avoid starting and stopping instantly)

-Scenario 2: "0 amps" solution, the charger behaves the same as in scenario 1 but instead of stopping the charge cycle it just sets the charge power to 0 amps until the situation clear (this could avoid having the dwell period)

Scenario 2 although desirable won't apply to all cars but it shouldn't be a condition to have Scenario 1 as the whole idea of having dynamic power balance is to allow for this scenarios, the issue here is that for Victron the dynamic balance going up to or over the max input limit is in the same park as overload protection and it is not the same, overload is a state of the inverter that has nothing to do to the max input limit as for example in my case I've it set to a value that is just for matching the max contracted power of my tariff, above that value there is still at least 10% margin till company meter cut kicks in and way more margin till protections for cabling kicks in.

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kudos50 ebringas commented · Feb 27 at 08:49 AM

As a Victron (D)ESS user I can tell you life is not that simple. So many people, so many use-cases. Specially if moving to fully electric requiring even more peak power.

I chose Victron simply because the other great out of box answers like Enphase simply do not integrate well with things outside of their own ecosystem. And yes, my AC-PV system is from Enphase so I had all the reason to expand on their ecosystem.

A very simple example is that almost every system needs grid meter input. Besides the obviously problem of not being able to fit more than one meter in your wiring closet, two different ecosystems are going to compete over the grid meter readings. An EV charger will throttle up and down once hitting the main breaker limit but so will an ESS system or worse, a DESS system.

If you want it all, either buy everything within the same ecosystem or buy something that allows you to integrate the various ecosystems. Victron allows the users to heavily customize and control their setup for that exact reason. If you feel the ev charger from Victron should integrate into their own ecosystem differently, just voice it (like you did) and/or build it.

If a single use-case is voiced more often, Victron may consider building or changing the integration for you. Until that time, I for one had this exact same issue with their EV charger so I just build it :-) If you consider fixing it yourself, let me know, more than happy to help.

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Answer 2 · 2024-02-27T17:58:19Z

Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) answered · Feb 27 at 05:58 PM

Not sure what you mean by putting the charge power to 0

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kudos50 commented · Feb 27 at 07:32 PM

Think we discussed this in another topic as well. For the Elvi you could set charge current to 0 instead of hitting the stop button. I'm not much of a charger guru but from what I have read there are 2 types of charge suspend methods:

SuspendedEV, when the car tells the charger it's either charged or has it's own charge schedule and is waiting for that schedule to kick in.

SuspendedEVSE, when the charger is telling the car it's unable to charge.

If the Elvi has charge current = 0 than the CP status turns SuspendedEVSE and all contactors remain active.

Again, not an expert but I'm fairly sure the car can stay connected like this for a long time. Getting energy whenever the charge current it raised to >= 6A.

I know that my own car (MX) automatically resumes charging if charge current >= 6A out of an SuspendedEVSE state. I also know my car will not automatically resume charging if the chargers power source has been questionable (overload?). Like on the campsite where it drops below 210V every now and then with a 10A 1P charge. It stops and never restarts.

It's probably just my false interpretation of things and quite honestly, my flows work like a charm for my use-case. You asked earlier where this is going. This was my attempt to explain why I (and the starter of this thread, and the installer of the other thread) feel the EVCS overload protection is not providing the same functionality as other chargers like EVBox or Tesla WC provide (I have both). It's not a bug as overload protection itself works fine. I'm apparently not helping the product forward with this discussion so I'm gonna leave it be.

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Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ kudos50 commented · Feb 27 at 07:39 PM

No, you don't have to leave it!

Now I understand what you mean, and probably we can do the same. Give me few days to test.

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Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented · Feb 29 at 03:00 PM

Ok, good news, it works!

We are preparing a new firmware around this feature, to use it in:
- Automatic mode when production is not enough
- Scheduled mode while waiting
- Overload while waiting for more power available
Anything else?
PS - thanks @kudos50 for suggesting this!

Maybe you can create a new topic, and we can continue the discussion in there?

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kudos50 Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented · Feb 29 at 04:07 PM

You do realise you changing this for others will break my flow for dual chargers :-) And considering I have 25A grid and 16A to the multi's I still need my flows.

Forum members that discuss overload protection also expressed concerns about the charge current only going down, never up. From the perspective of overloading multi's or other components, there is something to be said for only reducing. Making it configurable may make people happy ?

As you wish.. let's continue here:

https://community.victronenergy.com/questions/265910/evcs-feature-change-request-whilst-waiting-for-pow.html

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Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ kudos50 commented · Feb 29 at 04:17 PM

Probably in FW 1.28 the current will return to initial value after overload, but not to mess with your flows :)

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Answer 3 · 2024-03-20T17:33:02Z

ebringas answered · Mar 20 at 05:33 PM

@Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff)

To follow up on this issue after discarding the set to zero charge power suggested by kudos.

Last reply from my end:

In any case, I think that the the overload protection (due to input current limit) shouldn't modify the scheduler field "Current (A)" as this field affects the next time the scheduler kicks in on following days, and is causing that a momentary situation sets the scheduled charge power in amps for the future.

This is how dynamic power balancing should work (as it does in the rest of the chargers with this capability):

- Scenario 1:Max input limit 40a - the charger dynamically alters the charge current between the max charge and min charge limits (configured in the charger), the remaining power is less that 6a when it will need then to stop the charge (here it should have a dwell period to avoid starting and stopping instantly) doing this several times will in some cars give an error and stop the charge for good until the car is plugged off and in again, no problem here, if this is the case.

-Scenario 2 (My case): Max input limit 40a - the charger dynamically alters the charge current between the max charge and min charge limits (configured in the charger), the remaining power is above 6a so the charge is never stopped just reduced to avoid going over the max input limit.

the whole idea of having dynamic power balance is to allow for this scenarios, the issue here is that for Victron the dynamic balance going up to or over the max input limit is in the same park as overload protection and it is not the same, overload is a state of the inverter that has nothing to do to the max input limit as for example in my case I've it set to a value that is just for matching the max contracted power of my tariff, above that value there is still at least 10% margin till company meter cut kicks in and way more margin till protections for cabling kicks in.

all I ask is to have a functional dynamic power balancing, separated from overload and overcurrent protections, being able to toggle on/off these features as otherwise this charger just doesn’t meet industry standards, I’m hanging in hoping a solution is offered but don’t think I can keep going like this for much longer , having to wake up to a not charged car because current behavior decided to set charge power to 7a and the car charge almost nothing during the night, then having to pay extra on a public charger and also reminding myself to check each night if the schedule profile was changed the previous night.

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ebringas commented · Mar 25 at 07:39 PM

Hi @Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff)

Please, I’m still stuck in this flawed situation, please give me a hand here

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Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ ebringas commented · Mar 26 at 07:20 AM

The overload protection is ok for most of the installation. If you're not happy, you can disable it and create your own algorithm in nodered.

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ebringas Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented · Apr 01 at 11:26 PM

@Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) Yes you’ve said that already but I didn’t buy a professional en charger to have to be doing programming or whatever to get it to work as a normal charger does.

You have said it perfectly “overload protection” when it should be dynamic power balancing, the issue is that it is programmed as it is the same thing and it is not.

You offered me at the beginning of this post to have something done to allow disabling this behavior and making the charger work as a normal dynamic power balance enabled charger, could you please do something?

Im not asking for a custom or a weird thing that only will work for me, I’m just asking for Victron ev charger to have a normal dynamic power mode that will work for everyone even though you can make it optional by adding a specific button for it

I’m not a programmer, I don’t have a server lying around at home, I don’t want to get a raspberry to just be capable of charging my car with whatever power is available at home and I really think that this reply is not really acceptable coming from a brand representative.

Thinking on it again and seeing that it seems like I’m having to beg for a basic functionality that any other “smart” or connected ev charger has, don’t worry I’ll move away from the Victron ev charger and stop bothering Victron with real customer issues.

Regards

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ebringas Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented · Apr 15 at 10:04 PM

@Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) can you at least add as an option the possibility to have normal load balancing? And fix the charge power not returning to what is set in scheduled mode after it has been throttled down after reaching the max limit? Also after reaching max limit several time (not going over because the charger reduces power) don’t dropping it to the minimum but only adjusting the necessary so the total power doesn’t go over the limit?

Yes I know that if it goes down to less than six it will stop, and that if it stops several time some cars will stop the charge entirely but it is almost the same thing as going the entire night on 6 amps

I’ve tried to return it to the seller but of course as it has already been installed it doesn’t want to accept it back so I’m stuck with the charger and at least I need this functionality to be usable

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Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ ebringas commented · Apr 16 at 09:34 AM

Can you please check 1.28? As far as I remember, after the overload ends, the current is going back to the previous value. If it's not doing that, please write me and it will be fixed in 1.29

If you really want to return the unit, I can also help you with that.

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ebringas Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented · Apr 19 at 05:23 AM

Hi @Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff)

Tried with the v1.28 charge power comes back up during the charge session but the highest amps allowed are saved to the scheduled scene

In the following picture I set it to 25amps yesterday before the schedule started, this morning I found it to be 21 amps that is the same the charger used during the charge session

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ebringas Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented · 5 days ago

Hi @Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff)

The same happened tonight, but this time the value set in the scheduler when a peak of consumption occurred was 6 amps so this morning I found my EV without charge enough to get to my work and I’m running to find a public charger to charge it enough so I can make it there (I’ll be running late)

Have you had time to take a look or found anything wrong?

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Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ ebringas commented · 5 days ago

Hi, yes, it will be fixed in 1.29. I might give you a beta for testing before releasing the public version

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ebringas Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented · 5 days ago

Hi @Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff)

Sure, let me know

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Answer 4 · 2024-04-19T06:47:38Z

Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) answered · Apr 19 at 06:47 AM

Ok, we can simulate on our side and fix that

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ebringas commented · Apr 19 at 11:49 PM

hi @Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff)

Tested today with a heavy load besides the EV charger, long enough for it to trigger the overload for more than 5minutes if it happens then the amps value is altered in the scheduler scene and once the overload goes away the charger will only go up to the parameter amps set in the scheduler scene, in this case the one altered by the overload, restricting the charger for the rest of the sessions and any other started in scheduled mode

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