I’m curious if anyone has any DESS data on their system with Octopus energy UK.
At the moment I have cheaper overnight power (mainly advertised for EVs).
And the relatively standard export tariff of 15p.
I buy at 8.5p at night. And technically can sell at 15p during the day.
And just vary schedule charging based on time of the year.
I love the idea of having a really smart DESS setup with the more flexible tarrifs that use variable pricing etc, but worried/struggling to see myself beating the current setup.
I am currently on Octopus Agile and about to move from a deemed export to Octopus fixed export at 15p a unit.
Do you use the built in DESS link to your octopus account to retrieve your prices for export and import?
I have found that if i set a manual export price it fails to load the agile price data. I haven’t quite made the switch on the export side so curious if DESS retrieves both import and export tariff rates.
I also moved to this setup. It was from Octopus Flux which lost its shine for me as it seemed to be encouraging heavy export 4-7pm and not much discount on import if not heavily exporting.
I didn’t want to put my batteries through this sort of load for a few pence “gain”.
Topping up the batteries until 5.30 am for the little loss overnight then solar kicking in earlier than it would have done topped up under Flux is more beneficial exporting at 15p.
I’m looking forward to home assistant official integration but a spec for manual Scheduled Discharge with some additional features I’d love to have is below.
A scheduled export facility such that I can set the system (grid setpoint) to discharge the batteries for
1. N minutes
2. Until n% state of charge of the batteries.
3. Have a hot button that says discharge now for n minutes.
4. Be able to set the max discharge wattage. Say 2kW so as not to load the batteries so much or set to zero for default rate of discharge already in Victron settings.
An example or two would be
1. Octopus is giving away free electricity at 2-3pm. I set the system to discharge to 50% from 11-2pm at 2kW then charge from grid at no limit for one hour from 2-3pm
2. I have a high reward rate from Octopus for export from 4-7pm. Schedule discharge to no less than 50% during that time at 1.5kW.
3. I get an email today at 5.45 that octopus has paid export from 6-7.
At 6 pm I press the boost button and set “discharge now” for 59 minutes and set the export power to 3kw and set the state of charge to 65% on a couple of radio buttons.
Thanks. I have a very old integration over MQTT doing readings only which works ok. I Gave the grid set point control a try and couldn’t seem to get it to work.
Could you please send me a link to the integration setup you use and I’ll give it a try on a Proxmox test VM.
I heard someone say that Victron were going to do an official integration and they were working on it but I haven’t been able to trace it again.