Dear Victron team,
I am an African user of your products for over a year now, residing in Mali, West Africa, where we are currently facing significant electricity problems. I have two Multiplus 5kVA installations, one at home and one at the office, and a third 10kVA installation at a friend’s place.
Our main issue is that we cannot sell electricity back to the grid operator, and we experience power outages at random hours. We only get between 6 and 7 hours of electricity daily. Given the high cost of Victron equipment and batteries in our region, it would be great if we could configure your system to optimize energy savings without risking battery depletion.
I have looked into configuring an automatic switch between the building’s power sources (grid input and batteries) intelligently but could not find a way to do it. Here’s a configuration option that would be very useful for us:
Could you add a feature in your software that allows users to specify the minimum state of charge (SOC) for each hour of the day? For instance, let users define parameters like the following:
00:00:00 - 00:59:59 --------> min SOC = 60% (user-provided value)
01:00:00 - 01:59:59 --------> min SOC = 50%
02:00:00 - 02:59:59 --------> min SOC = 45%
03:00:00 - 03:59:59 --------> min SOC = 40%
...
12:00:00 - 12:59:59 --------> min SOC = 70%
...
23:00:00 - 23:59:59 --------> min SOC = 65%
The advantage of this configuration is that it allows us to draw only the minimum power we need from the grid while ensuring the batteries remain sufficiently charged for evening use.
Currently, since we do not know when electricity will be available, all we know is that it will not exceed 7 hours a day (and often as little as 4 hours), we are forced to manually change the SOC settings repeatedly to save energy and prioritize battery consumption.
I remain available for any questions at my email address.
Thank you!