NOW here is my problem I DO NOT use the expensive rate Octopus energy SO monitoring my Smart meter is a NO GO for automation purposes as 99.99% of the time my house is running on my four US5000 batteries 20kWh. WELL not quite as if we assume a 95% usage or minimum SOC of 5% {which is the setting as I write this} that is 19kWh Now IF I make the minimum SOC 20% that means I only have 16kWh this is NOT an issue in the summer when my 3.7 kW of solar should on a good sunny day be running the house loads {typically 22/24kWh per day} and charging the batteries. In the winter lots of solar energy is an issue for a number of reasons which I wont repeat here. BUT on a good sunny day like today I managed 3.15kWh. The best summer days performance in 2025 was 24kWh which is about the same as my house loads. I have purchased two more US5000 batteries and I think I will connect both of them to give me 30kWh or at a 20% SOC the 24kWh that my house needs (I may only connect one of them and sell the other one) which on the same basis would give me 20kWh of battery energy.
So back to automating daytime cheap Octopus Energy. That will automatically charge my car (as Octopus have control of my Hypervolt Home Pro 3 EV charger BUT what I would like to do initially is use this daytime low cost energy to charge the batteries (maybe even operate the change over switch to run the house from the grid on this cheap energy) BUT how to automate some of any of this is my question.
ONCE the Hypervolt App tells me that tomorrow I will be getting cheap energy between ??.?? and ??.?? I can quickly schedule a MP2 charge session for that day and activate it, since it will be based on what individual day. BUT this does mean daily manual intervention. Octopus will limit my HV HP3 charging time to a maximum of 6 hours no matter when my car get charged (seems people were gaming the Octopus low cost energy availability - so now the EV charging is limited to a max of six hours at the low rate) BUT my house will not be limited in that manner so IF tomorrow is typical I will have 12 hours of low cost energy to use and that can be used for anything including to charge my batteries. IF for some weird reason my HV HP3 EV charger was not fully charging the car battery then I could even use my granny charger (NOT that I think that could ever be necessary)
In fact until I have changed the battery on the Leaf to the 40kWh one I have {sitting waiting for better weather to instal} the Leaf is only use for infrequent short journey trips So it is going to be interesting looking at the HV HP3 statistics to see how much the car gets charged on a daily/weekly basis.
LIKE I SAID I cannot see how I can automatically sense OR know when Octopus are providing me with Low Cost energy.
Technically you will still monitor your smart meter / octopus API as this still tells you when your on off peak rate. I do not use peak rate electricity (except if im using more than I can invert) as I use this trigger in my automation to charge/discharge.
as you can see, this is the off peak entity in home assistant provided by the Octopus integration/API. I then use this in my automations as the trigger to run a script that set the victron ESS batterylife state to either Keep_Batteries_Charged or BL_Disabled
MMMMM well my Hypervolt App told me about two upcoming schedules for yesterday
BUT they did not happen But later on in the day I got Five hours of low cost energy this automatically started charging me RV and I did a quick MP2 schedule to charge my batteries
FULLY CHARGED to 100% and you can see my mid-day solar having an effect yesterday it was running all the house loads AND charging the batteries
Today is not as sunny and ATM we are in the BIG FIR TREE SHADE TIME
It would appear that Octopus cheap daytime energy is a dynamic thing
I have already spoken to Octopus regarding my display and my mini being able to âannounceâ âLow Cost Energyâ and they have indicated {the Octopus Mini Team} that this would be and could be something that they would like to implement
I do not know how to interrogate my smart meter to discover that Octopus are in a low charge energy period.
I am and was amazed and excited to see the Hypervolt App indicate low cost schedule times BUT then upset to see them not implemented. As it was yesterday and a Saturday the Octopus Support lines we not manned so I could not ask why these scheduled events had disappeared {I had by then set up two MP2 matching charge schedules}
WELL Octopus iGO seems to be quite awesome, giving me lots and lots of low cost energy
My BSS batteries have never been as well charged until I got the iGO tariff.
Forgetting the six hours overnight for my HVHP3 EV charger. Today it seems I will get three low cost sessions one in the afternoon for two and a half hours the two more in the evening starting at 22:30 and ending at 07:30 tomorow morning.
So the iGO tariff seems to offer much much more than âjustâ the six hours of EV charging.
AWESOME, now all I need to do if find out how I can automate the iGO Low Cost sessions to charge the BSS Batteries.
Thinking more about this I cannot see a CT on my line to the HV HP3 EV Charger working, as unlike my BSS Batteries the car is not going to need charging at all the variable and random Octopus low cost energy periods. That means that unless my car is being charged the BSS Batteries wont be getting a Low Cost Charge. MMMMMMM
This is where you should look at setting up the Home Assistant integrations, it can be installed on a mini pc, raspberry pi etc.. if you donât already use it. I see you created a new topic on this. So happy to move the conversation over to that thread.
Well I got my hands on a HA Yellow for FOUR DAYS of misery it is now back with the seller to see if he can make it work
I had a 400 mile drive yesterday to collect two more US5000 batteries
And they are not yet installed in my cabinet. BUT I spent the morning wiring them up so I now have 600Ah or 30kWh of capacity. Setting the min SOC to 20% will match the house loads of around 24kWh so I think that is the capacity issue sorted. I did deliberately (well not 100%) as I could only find four US5000 batteries at sensible prices when i was initially gathering the bits together for my BSS. That issue is now sorted.
Of course nothing is dead simple, as at first the master battery was alarming and the one or two of the new to me batteries would drop offline (just needing balancing I suppose) BUT after six hours installed without any assistance from Octopus providing add-hoc off-peak scheduling, they are now all six online and things are looking good. It will be interesting to see the SOC around 04:00 hours when previously with some during the day solar assistance of around 2/3kWh the four batteries were sitting at 100% SOC for quite some time.
Hopefully I will get a working HA system soon and maybe this HA Yellow will come back to me working. That will mean I do not have to do daily rescheduling of my charging NOR taking my car for a wee drive just to get the battery SOC < 100% ONCE I have the HA doing automatic off-peak charging that is not unique to me and my cars need for battery charging.
WELL after a short journey to the shopping centre and back with ECO switched off, the SOC of the Leaf was 85%
So Octopus set up three or four add-hoc off-peak charging sessions. This resulted in my car taking 3.47kWh of off-peak energy, that cost 25p BUT then by 23:30 when my contracted off-peak energy starts the SOC of the BSS batteries was at 55% so my batteries get to a 100% SOC for about an hour. And looking at the discharge rate, the line in the graph is much much shallower with the additional capacity
Of course just as you think sorted!!! I was tiding up the installation so mounted the CERBO GX on the wall in what I thought was a good and a final location for it. OOOOH NO Now with the MP2 between it and my router (line of sight) if i am on the VRM App it is losing the WiFi signal frequently (it has been working solidly for weeks now with it just sitting on the floor) so I will need to relocate it. {probably as far away as possible from the MP2}
The Virgin Media Router does not have a strong WiFi signal as I discovered when installing the Hypervolt Home 3 Pro EV Charger. I guess that is deliberate marketing ploy as VM want to sell you their intelligent WiFi Pods mesh WiFi boosters.
