I am using a Victron MultiPlus II 5000 in combination with DESS. My grid connection is 1x35A, and peak shaving is set above 35A. The circuit breaker for the MultiPlus is 1x16A.
At night, I usually charge my electric car. I have noticed that, even when electricity is cheap, part of the charging energy comes from the battery instead of being drawn entirely from the grid. I would like to prevent this.
My question: Which (D)ESS settings can ensure that the battery does not discharge at night?
Any tips are welcome! Thanks in advance for your help.
You can use a scheduled charge. You set the scheduled charge to a low SoC like 10% or at least lower than the battery SoC so it will not actually charge the battery. The battery is not allowed to discharge when on a scheduled charge so all consumption will be from the grid.
I often do the same as I have cheap-rate electricity at night so I have an automatic scheduled charge start at 10pm and end at 6am.
Thanks for the consideration, but this wasn’t the issue. I actually made a mistake with the DESS settings. I had set the max in and export power to 2.5kW instead of 8kW. Now everything is working as expected.
I dont understand. With this increased, the EV charger is not draining your battery? How have you prevented this?
It seems that if ev charger is connected to ac-in, it will drain the battery first and hereafter use grid. It should be possible to set the ev cs to “use grid only” option to not interfere with the house battery ie. during winter.
I am wondering if DESS can prevent the home battery from draining (into the EV battery) if it calculates that using electricity from the grid is cheaper (at night for instance).
Schedule Charge will also drain the battery, it does for me. We schedule Charge every night between 24:00-06:00 and it always takes from Battery first. Wish there was a way not to
I have only multi’s on phase 1&2 and therefore only connected on ac-in. Else I need to buy a third multi
For winter: It can be possible to do a change mode to “charge only mode” when ev charger is active. This might disturb the DESS, but I guess ev charger will do this anyway due to the high load and high energy usage.
What about summer?? I had DESS active and had a full battery and excess ~2kW where going to grid. So connected the ev charger, but since solar was 2kw and car charge was 6kw, the 4kw was drawn from grid. Why did it not draw from battery since the ev charger is a just a house load(non victron charger, Zaptec Go). Prices where a bit high but still better getting power on car than selling.
Can’t you just reduce inverter power to a rather low value close to the consumption of the rest of your house? Something like 200 W? Every load above 200 W would then come from the grid. This setting can be done automatically via Node Red.
