Home Assistant and Octopus intelligent GO Tariff

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1

OK I am having REAL Problems with Octopus and the Octopus add-hoc off-peak sessions.

For the last 10/14 days i have been getting NO add-hoc off-peak sessions

Contacting Octopus they said my Hypervolt Home 3 Pro Ev charger kept going offline so they could not upload these add-hoc off-peak sessions and to contact Hypervolt. Hypervolt said that the WiFi signal was very poor (I knew this at installation time and contacted Virgin Media to come and fix that issue. NO SIGN of them coming to fix this) Chatting to Hypervolt support (great people) and explaining my present system installation, they said the best long term fix was to hard wire the charger. So having a long coil of CAT5e cable :-), that was just a few hours work (ATM the EV Charger is in a temporary location on the back of my wooden garage door and running on my external {garden waterproof sockets} they are on a 16A RCBO in the consumer unit) with the charger strapped down to charge at a max of 10A (a simple switch setting on the HVH3P charger).

FIXED!!! OH NO

Plenty of fun and games, OVER TWO DAYS with Octopus until we got the EV Charger adopted and working.

FIXED!!! well ALMOST

I get a number of Octopus add-hoc off-peak sessions sent to my Hypervolt EV charger and I can see them on the Hypervolt App, {see picture} so I open VRM and go into the Console - Settings - System Setup - ESS - Scheduled charge levels. and set up some schedules for the Octopus add-hoc off-peak sessions, One through Four are free as Schedule Five is set for for my every day iGO 23:30 Six Hour off-peak session.

Now as I have discovered Octopus do NOT make available to their users accurate interactive real time energy status information (WELL NOT EASILY) you cannot interrogate the meter electronically.

YOU can look at historical data on their web site and even in some detail in spreadsheet form sadly without titles for each entry so you need to write your own spreadsheet with some automation and import their data OR be busy with a calculator.

AND the Mini and the App ARE NOT SHOWING ACCURATE REAL TIME DATA.

ALL the App shows for energy status (standard or off-peak) is the FIXED iGO information. It would appear that it does not know about Octopus add-hoc off-peak sessions. YES it can see and display (real time with a minimum delay) the energy being used BUT NOT the charging rates {standard and off-peak} that has to wait till the next day at a minimum.

So having set up my schedules as per advised to me by Octopus VIA the Hypervolt App

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I USE them. BUT next day looking at that usage, I discover that some of this reported Octopus add-hoc off-peak session energy are being charged at the standard rate {the colour of the bar changes (NEXT DAY but NOT real time)}

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Obviously I have contacted Octopus about this, three mails sent so far :frowning:

BUT Today I purchased a (new never used) Home Assistant Yellow at a sensible price.

SO I understand that when there is going to be Octopus add-hoc off-peak sessions Octopus {let us know with the open API} and that using HA we can capture these messages and I HOPE that I can then use the HA Box to talk to the CERBO GX and MP2 and start charging my batteries.

So that is where I am now

I want to automate using the Octopus add-hoc off-peak sessions to charge my batteries.

HELP PLEASE

2

Looks like one fairly simple inexpensive option would be to put a CT on the line to the charger and then make sure that my EV always needs charged and then figure out what I can call that and how can I use that to initiate battery charging OR I could put in an ET112 energy meter on the charger supply line.

3

hi @FlyingScot
Look into HACS (home assistant community store). There you will find several Victron integrations for the connection type of your choise. There is ModBus, MQTT and VRM-API. I use MQTT to show Victron on HA’s Energy Dashboard.

4

thanks I wont have my hands on the Home Assistant Yellow until the middle of this week

but looked there and ATM that looks like a foreign language to me :frowning:

5

I spoke to Octopus this morning and I am even more confused BUT now have some clarity on various issues.

EVERYTHING you can see as a user online or with the App is estimates, the energy use data is correct, but the status (standard or off-peak) and the charging of that energy use is a ‘shot in the dark’ the only time I will get accurate (I Hope) data is when I get the monthly bill which has attached at the bottom of the bill daily energy usage and costs on a day by day basis.

NOW I am obviously confused I thought that Octopus had country wide add-hoc off-peak schedules.

Octopus, well the person I spoke with says NOT.

BUT IF YOU KNOW DIFFERENTLY PLEASE LET ME KNOW

Regarding using my Hypervolt app to know about add-hoc off-peak energy periods and use that energy to charge both my car and the BSS Batteries. The octopus person says, that these off-peak schedules are unique to me and my car, AND if my car does not require charging as the battery is at 100% SOC then Octopus will NOT plan and implement any off-peak charging schedules.

Intelligent Octopus Go (EV Tariff): Provides six fixed off-peak hours (11:30 PM to 5:30 AM) at a low rate for your entire home, plus additional “ad-hoc” off-peak charging times if your EV is scheduled to charge outside those hours. {My Bolding} OWELL :frowning:

So it looks like I MUST drive my car daily in order to get any add-hoc {unique to me} off-peak energy sessions.

So my idea of using my Hypervolt charger to sense add-hoc off-peak energy sessions, is a total NO GO.

So it looks like the HA and learning how to program that to sense and use Octopus add-hoc off-peak energy sessions is the best if not actually almost the only way forward.

6

WELL AFTER FOUR DAYS OF NIGHTMARE

I could not get the HA Yellow to work, initially it booted up wanting my (the user) log in name and password I tried to reset it and tried to communicate with it using it USB C EVERYTHING Failed and eventually it would not even boot up and had a steady Green Led on.

Totally frustrated and quite upset I gave up on it before I downloaded the HA O/S as advised by the people on the HA Forum

So it is winging its way but to the supplier who said it was unused and he said that he had not logged into it strange that it did not boot up into the ’hello new user please input your info screen’

BUT obviously not a FAN of a HA Yellow box :frowning:

Once it gets back to the seller he is going to see if he can get it working and obviously will advise me and I will let you know as well

7

Seller says the CM4 Module is dead wont load the HA OS

After this nightmare should I just purchase a HA Green OR a Mini PC and load the HA OS on that ?

Advice please

8

I have a HA Yello with CM5. Works like a charm. I see no reason why a CM4 won’t load HA. They needed special adjustment to make HA compatible with CM5/Rpi5. I use Rpi4 before.

Do you use CM4 storage or SSD?
They need different configuration. I have Can5 without nvram and use an M2 SSD

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Well the HA yellow just would not talk to ‘me’ no matter what I tried and back with the seller they cannot get it to load the HA O/S and they say the CM4 is dead and I have had my purchase money refunded.

10

You were better off building a PC I just use RPI for a display and they crash often the 5 not so much but the 4 yep. Specially if you start to do whole home automations but not the best time now considering ram prices now

11

NOT REALLY ATM simply to automate Octopus add-hoc off-peak energy use watching my Hypervolt Home 3 Pro EV charger seems to be a nightmare Octopus set up three Schedules tonight so I set them up manually on VRM But then the first one vanished and the second one times changed then two now ones for early tomorrow appear

Thankfully with my ‘now’ 30kWh of Pylontech batteries I do not really need anything other than the iGO contracted overnight off-peak energy BUT I would love to have automation that would let me watch rather than having to manually set up schedules. Some Sunshine would help a lot as well, a few days ago I got 4.63kWh that is the highest since I installed this VE BSS a number of months ago now and that figure will only get better as the sun moves higher in the sky as the year goes on. And soon I am planning on some more solar ‘DC this time’ with some big more modern more efficient panels and VE MPPT solar controllers.

I might get that HA Yellow back as a for spares or repair job, and was thinking of putting a CM5 processor in it, and as I have lots of M.2 NVMe SSD drives I might purchase the cheap CM5 one with no onboard memory. Though I might just put a nice new CM4 in it and prove that the whole concept works. Lots more fun and games ahead :slight_smile:

12

OK well the HA Yellow is coming back to me not working for spares or repair.

So assuming the CM 4 is dead {how can I find out if it is dead - who can test if for me?}

But lets say that my HA yellow needs a new RPi processor should I put in a CM4 or upgrade it to a CM5
It looks like playing with a Nabu Casa Home Assistant box is going to be somewhat interesting just getting it working, then the real fun will start loading the HA O/S, and then getting all the automation installed and working.

BUT should i start with a CM4 Processor OR a CM5 one

thanks for any thoughts and advice

The only GOOD NEWS is that adding two additional US5000 batteries has brought my BSS capacity up to totally be able to handle the house loads, even in the winter months with little or no solar energy input. However the Octopus ‘system’ for off-peak energy is difficult to understand as no sooner have they set up three or more schedules to charge my car and I have matched these schedules manually using the VRM than Octopus change them. :frowning:

13

lol they always change the times of it had mine change about 3 times in like 20 or so minutes. Not sure on the HA boxes I just built my own from an AMD 8 core that I had. You will find that you start automating everything. Some of the charging that Octopus do is for minutes sometimes.

14

Go for CM5 8GB ram and w/n NVRAM and use larger M2 SSD. I have 4TB. That whay you get fast response on “history” graphs fir analysis.

15

OK thanks I have a few 2TB M2 NVRAM SSD’s and yes i have noticed Octopus doing 4 minute add-hoc off-peak energy sessions I thought it was a log on issue with me Hypervolt Home 3 Pro EV charger BUT now it is hard wired in that should not be an issue EXCEPT Virgin Media are still having broadband ISSUES for about the last four or five days now :frowning: and when I enquire as to when that is going to be resolved I get a check back later message :frowning:

16

Just saw with latest HA OS 1.7.0 support for 32bit ARM7 CPUs, e.g. RPi 1-4 have been skipped.
RPi 5 is supported.