I’ve been using DESS Trade Mode for some time and it has overall improved over time with various fixes and updates. However there is one persistent issue that is costing me in standard rates which are over 4x the price of cheap rate.
The issue can clearly be seen in the image below:
DESS was expecting a battery excess (based on projected PV and load) and so exported most of this excess between 5-8am.
However, solar production and/or consumption were lower/higher than expected meaning battery ran out before the the end of the standard rate.
This results in importing at standard rate (30p vs 7p), which would not have been required if the early morning export hadn’t been done.
The way to address this is to adjust the alogiritm used (at least in the case of dual-price tarrifs, rather than agile tarrifs) to not export projected excess eagerly, but rather (within export rate limits), plan to export any reminaing excess later in standard rate period, before the cheap rate starts.
Without seeing your buy and sell prices, it’s difficult to follow.
I’m assuming they’re the same?
You can game the system a little to shift the export into the desired times:
If, for example, you can export for 6 hours but only want to export towards the end, simply configure the last 6 hours as 30.1 | ... | 30.6 pence. That won’t make any real difference in the evaluation, but DESS will then favour the last few hours for export.
The utlity graph shows my buy prices: £0.07 off-peak (23.30->5.30) and £0.30 peak. My sell price is fixed £0.12.
Yes, I could artificially reduce the price at the end of the day, and this might help. However, the schedule whould ideally be more conversative preferring to export later on in the day with known solar/consumption, rather than preferring to export earlier in the day based on projected solar/consumption.
Two reasons not ideal to “game” system, and improvement in algorithm would be better:
Can’t use the integration to use utility pricing directly.
