Helloall,
Have you got any hints on why my system is pulling from the grid when I have a battery over 70%? Today I pulled 1.6kwhs at about 40p/kwh which added up over the month is quite a sum.
As you can see from the Octopus graph, I’m pulling premium grid charge every day even though my batteries never get below 50% as I’m also pulling 3kw from my solar for about 6hrs a day.
@Dirk-Jan
Hi Richard,
It looks like, even though you configured Dynamic ESS, you have never actually activated it by toggling it on:
I’ve blurred the name and vrm id of your site in the screenshot.
After toggling it on you will also start to see the planning of the system on the main dashboard (under the installation data).
yes i did use DESS in January but it was very bad. The system didn’t find the cheapest electricity and just seemed to randomly charge my batteries, see below:
as you can see from one typical day in January:
So I am cautious about using dynamic ess for this reason, it’s cost me over £200 this year!
thanks for your help.
I’ve had another look at DESS and see that you can set a fixed time when its best to charge batteries but although I can set the time limits, i can’t set the electricity rates - see below:
Hi, it looks like you are using Octopus from the screenshot you shared earlier, and we’ve made a connector for Octopus that should be available to you when you select dynamic.
In the meantime, we will work on making that price field a little bit bigger on the mobile view. 
Without DESS switched on, the price isn’t considered in a normal ESS system, which is how your system was running. That is what put me to the wrong conclusion.
If you have an Octopus contract, setting the system to run with fixed prices isn’t really the best option either. So I think it is better to figure out why your system wasn’t running correctly. I don’t have enough log data to to analyse why it didn’t work correctly in January. If you do activate Dynamic ESS again, I’d be happy to check if the system behaves in the way it is supposed to or else find the cause for it not behaving correctly.
Can you also increase the log interval for the VRM logging from 15 minutes to every minute too? And post the date and time when the system doesn’t behave as you expect? (The original message mentions “today”, but the screenshot seems to be from the 25 of May until the 26th).
What does your current contract look like? Is that fixed priced? That can also work. IIRC also directly via the Octopus link. And otherwise by filling it out. The currency is a setting in the general options for the site.
My current contract is 00:30 - 05:30 @ 8p/kwn and all else at 35p/kwh. I’m not sure what you mean by the rest of your sentence.
On your screenshot it showed that your site was set to Euro (€). Via the general → currency settings, you can set that to pounds.
Then on my other remark “IIRC also directly via the Octopus link.”: Your site has configured the API key for Octopus in for the buy prices. That doesn’t only allow fetching Octopus pricing for Dynamic contracts, but also for their “normal” / fixed price contracts. Which means that you don’t need to fill out fixed prices for normal Octopus contracts either.
But lets get back to your site and the issue you reported: “Have you got any hints on why my system is pulling from the grid when I have a battery over 70%?”
You now configured your site without Dynamic ESS in the ESS mode: “Optimized without BatteryLife” to do scheduled charging between 0:30 and 5:30 till 50% SOC, right?
The graph on the dashboard shows quite clear that it took from grid during that period yesterday plus 2 small pulls of each 0.1 kWh each outside of that window.
Those really small pulls are something that can’t be completely avoided and happen e.g. when appliances start pulling a lot of power and the system needs a few seconds to react to.
If you set the dropdown to “consumption” you see the red bars are really tiny compared to what the rest of the consumption was.
I did go a couple of days back and do see some higher bumps in the week before (e.g. the 1st of June). Did you alter anything?
Yes on the 3rd June I mistakenly set a schedule charging period for 5:30 to 6:30 so pulled in about 12Kw at 35p/kw. That’s the only time I’ve set a schedule charge all the other times are when the system itself has decided to access the grid.
I’ve considered the Octopus agile tariff but it rarely goes below 12p/kwh where as my tariff is 8.63p/kwh (00:30 - 05:30) and 29.72p/kwh all other times.
@Richardweir77 What is your grid setpoint and which energy meter do you have? If you show the kWh it will be useful, but as @dfaber explained I saw approx 0.3-0.6 kWh per day and nearly eliminated it using a current transformer as opposed to ET112 and using a -50 grid setpoint. Some other meters are much faster and the topic has been well covered in the past.
My grid set point is set to 0W and I have an ET112 meter. should i use the new Victron meter?
@Richardweir77 The selection guide is worth a look and the Victron meter is a good option, although if you have 25mm2 meter tails the small CT may not fit with it rated 75A so smaller mm2. A CT may be an option worth exploring and much will depends on some of the above points. Also do you have room a a larger energy meter? https://www.victronenergy.com/upload/documents/Datasheet-Energy-Meters-Selection-Guide-EN.pdf
