Can someone point me towards documentation about setting the Minimum SOC % remotely via either Modbus, MQTT, RPC(?) or even local ssh / shell commands if doable.
I'll take whatever messaging flavour Victron wants!
I skim read the ESS Manual and apart from Schedule Charging (not quite what I need) I saw nothing about remotely controlling Minimum SOC%. Hopefully this is achievable as I wish to adjust SOC% based on environmental, time and demand conditions.
Many thanks, Dan
Do you want to do more than this? Also look at the modifications space where users may have done similar you with regards to TOU.
Hi @ejrossouw – thanks for the reply. I take TOU to mean 'off peak, battery top up from grid?' which is not quite my situation. But I'll search the modification forum later and see what I can find.
In a nutshell, I need to maintain 40% SOC at all times in case of blackout *except* when I know sunshine is imminent and I have a increase in demand (usually pre-dawn / at dawn) which the battery could handle to avoid drawing from grid.
The increase in demand at dawn is not scheduled. So it makes no sense to schedule SOC. There is the water boiler & household waking up, which the same every morning, however the bulk of additional loads are due to other Home Assistant automations (irrigation pumps based on forecast / soil moisture, borehole based on tank levels etc. etc.).
I have a Home Assistant automation that *could* intelligently adjust SOC % based on my text above ... but I'm not sure what communication method I can use to tell the Victron equipment.
Right now the HA automation sends a notification to my mobile phone, and I log into the Remote Console / VRM and make SOC % changes manually. Which is stupid :)
Thanks again! Dan
I am a Victron beginner myself, but what I did is update VenusOS to the "large" image version. You can then use the graphical Node RED environment (either directly via a web browser port on your GX, or via a button in VRM which opens a proxy to your GX) to connect to any system you like (add weather nodes, MQTT, RPC nodes etc.)
There are other ways to do what you want to do, but that seems to be the "slickest"
Hi Dan
I was already using MQTT with Home assistant so I integrated my Cerbo GX using that method.
Here's a another thread on the same topic:
https://community.victronenergy.com/questions/63997/home-assitant-integration-with-victron.html
Here's a nice set of instructions to get you going:
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/victron-venus-os-with-mqtt-sensors-switches-and-numbers/527931
This may be useful to find the registers you want:
https://github.com/victronenergy/dbus_modbustcp/blob/master/CCGX-Modbus-TCP-register-list.xlsx
You can also just send an empty keep alive message to the Cerbo and it will publish out everything. You'll find that you need to publish a keep alive every minute anyway to request the data you want. This is a simple automation in HA though.
Let me know if you opt for this and get stuck.
I was intending to automate my target SOC % based on Forecast.Solar integration data but so far I've found my forecast vs. actual weather to be too unpredictable. My consumption varies a lot too so I just manually set the SOC daily (in Home Assistant).
