Thanks for the response and feedback. It’s great to save time with automation.
I think the system feature I’m looking for isn’t actually one I should be requesting in the Dynamic ESS forum, but perhaps the Victron main software discussion.
The other software I’ve seen from competitors system allows scheduled discharging for time and duration entries but lacks the boost feature I mentioned.
I think some customers are just not ready for the way DESS works right now regarding predictability and accuracy and the tariffs we are on have too much of a tight profit spread to overcome inefficiencies of charge discharge to make the loss of battery cycle life give confidence that it’s worth it. We don’t all use the Octopus Agile dynamic pricing for one reason or another.
Competitors systems and the support provided don’t come close to the quality and support of Victron, modularity and customisability for residential, RV and boat, which is why Victron design is great.
I’d love a Victron designed interface for scheduled discharging based on the fixed times tariffs because you guys know the system so well it wouldn’t be a huge change to adjust / duplicate the scheduled charging page to set the negative grid set point accordingly. Or perhaps DESS could be tweaked to make this closer to the spec mentioned for us that don’t want full automation.
If not then I may need to get my head around node Red or my home assistant setup to try again at changing set point over MQTT and add the timed functions and buttons that way which has not been successful so far for a non techy.
+1 from me too on requesting Victron please add a simple scheduling option for discharging the batteries. To mirror the charging scheduling options in VRM, along with a simple button in VRM to manually discharge.
As much as I like the concept of Dynamic ESS, the solar forecasting for our location in the NW of the UK is often miles away from the reality of the weather we get. (no different to all the other weather forecasts for our area) I can’t see how it can be accurate with the forecasting being quite inaccurate a high percentage of the time?
Hi Ben - it looks like it’s pulled in the prices, you seem to have a graph with the prices on?
It sounds like your question can be answered by the ‘Fixed’ option when setting the prices, this lets you input a 24h table of pricing rather than pull it from some source.
If you want to manually post dynamic pricing, it is possible I was doing it in NodeRed before UK became available in the settings; basically updating the fixed prices twice a day.
So other than switching DESS off for the night, how do I ensure the system takes full advantage of negative prices tonight and I wake up with a nearly or completely full battery please
Yes. And a schedule charge (please). The prices this week have been pretty high and DESS just doesn’t take advantage of the lowest daily prices in the way I did manually. As per my post further down, tonight the prices go negative, but I’ve no confidence when I wake up the system will take advantage of them and charge the battery to 100% which is what I would have done before.
Have been heating the house this evening with electric heaters to run the battery down and to keep my wife happy.
I also have a timed switch to the immersion heater and another timed switch to an oil filled heater to come on in the morning.
The above items are activated with low cost Sonoff devices.
It is nice to know that these actions reduce constraint payments to wind generators.
Activation of a Multiplus relay at a user defined set price would allow external devices to be operated automatically. The set price can be compared with the half hourly price extracted from Octopus.
To update: looking at the Tomorrow chart, it tells me it’ll charge the battery to 100% during the cheap rates. Between friends, I’ll admit I was mainly looking at the wrong layer of information. The top bit tells me what it’s doing and going to do, the bottom bit doesn’t. I guess that’s partly why I’ve found it difficult to trust. That’s user incompetence not system failure, I’m happy to admit.
Hi, DESS looks exciting but I’m falling at the first hurdle, I can’t get it to import the daily Octopus agile rates. I know the account and key are correct because I have just switched tariffs from flexible and DESS imported the fixed 23p rate when I first set it up.
Now the current price and schedule are stuck on 23p. I can’t make 23p go away even if I remove all Octopus account settings.
The change of tariff from Octopus was only on Wednesday morning so the problem could be with them updating their feed but I can’t tell.
Perhaps adding the date and time prices were last imported to the Energy prices graph might be helpful. Thanks in advance for any advice.
Is it possible to set a pricing cap for different situations? For example, we could set up to 5p/Kwh to charge the battery and loads. Between 5p-10p to just power the loads and over 10p to discharge the battery. Also, implement an option to charge the battery if it reaches a low state of charge when prices stay over 10p for days. In this case, ESS will charge the battery at the lowest average price of the last few days, charging the battery up to 50%, for example. All these values I just mentioned are to be customisable by the user. That would be a really useful system instead of relying on the ESS to create plan for us.
Hello again,
I’ve been testing the DESS on Agile tariff since beta and it did its thing right until recently,
There seems to be an error as the system is importing at £0.18 and selling at £0.11 and leaving the battery low for the peak period VRM ID: d4124390b410 VRM
The malfunction seems to have started on 08/November, I was operating the beta firmware on Cerbo until yesterday but the malfunction persisted on the official release too.
I would have expected to charge the battery at a cheaper rate and discharge only at a higher rate than imported,
Thank you @dfaber for the advice in the closed topic it’s all working as intended, (I had to update the inverters firmware to use the function)
Edit: found the root cause, it appears as soon as solar production starts DESS follows the grid setpoint from Cerbo, I had an abandoned automation which is now disabled and behaviour chablnged to what I would have expected, sorry for confusion
We upgraded Venus OS to v3.5.1 yesterday then discovered it seems that you guys have now removed the “Buy” & “Sell” option buttons from the mode menu within the Dynamic ESS settings.
We regularly manually discharge our batteries back to the grid, especially when we get the short notice Octopus Energy Savings Sessions. I simply used the “Sell” button to do this.
Equally, we are now also at short notice getting free 1 hour and multiple hours of “Power Up” sessions when we manually used the “Buy” button to charge up our batteries for free.
Please, please, please can you reinstate these 2 options back into the menu or simply just add these basic control function buttons into the Control Menu.
Feedback on using Dynamic ESS in Auto mode. - I have tried it several times, but abandoned using it because it seems to want to charge and discharge our batteries at the wrong times. I’ve observed the solar forecasting for our area to be wildly inaccurate which isn’t helping the situation.
I haven’t setup DESS purely for the reasons that our local solar predictions are also wildly inaccurate and the many reports of selling at low price and charging at higher prices while this evolves.
A simple buy /sell button with incremental 1 minute timer would be good and a number of schedules to automate reliable and predictable charging and discharging in the same interface noting the poor predictability of forecasting above.
Now in November I’m scheduling 85% charging 2am - 5am to 85% (10.5kwh batts) when 3kwh of solar is that day predicted. We use 5kwh per day. This leaves 6kwh to start the night with.
When we get near 4-7pm expensive hour I schedule a fallback charge to 60% at day rates in case we’re low.
If a “free” energy hour was notified I could schedule battery charging quickly or if a saving session notified at short notice I could equally plan a “sell” during this peak 4-7pm Octopus session if the sun had been good that day.
It would be spectacularly useful if scheduled charging/discharging with a “boost sell/buy” with 15 minute increments of both were all in the same interface to enable the above.
Thanks for incorporating Intelligent Octopus for DESS but solar Octopus tariffs like Flux are more suited to Scheduled ESS for buying/selling.
There is not a way DESS could predict some of the tariff changes mentioned above. So while the assertion than DESS is a panacea, what would be a nice development consideration is Semi Dynamic ESS (SDESS).
@dfaber I agree with @Dune7 request to add simple discharge scheduling alongside the charge scheduling all in the same menu, along with a manual discharge button.
With Octopus in the UK we get short notice (day before for upcoming free one hour sessions and only a few hours before an export savings session)
So far the free hour sessions have all started at 13:00, so because your API integration won’t do this automatically, I manually discharge our batteries low enough to take full advantage of charging them back up again for free during the 13:00-14:00 period.
For savings sessions, I follow the same process in reverse, making sure our batteries are fully charged before the savings session starts, then discharging down to a comfortable SOC that will carry us through to 2:00, when the low Flux import rate starts.
It would be fantastic if Dynamic ESS could work automatically for the 2 scenarios above, but I’d be more than happy with some basic manual and scheduling for both charge and discharge please.
Since you removed the Buy & Sell buttons, I can only discharge by changing the grid setpoint, so a big backwards step.
I’m getting some strange behaviour… The calculations seem to have gone haywire. There’s a massive difference between its prediction and reality. Any ideas?
