I have a victron system running Dynamic ESS. I have disabled battery balancing as I don’t want to lose out on any profit, As today was a very long day with lots of sun the energy prices were low for a very long part of the day, I decided to manually charge the batteries all the way full to 100% by requiring the minimum state of charge to be 100%. This in turn also automatically turned on battery balancing. This battery balancing however requires the batteries to display 100% or 99% for at least x hours before it considers the balancing to be complete, my batteries occasionally dip to 98% or 97% and therefor do not disable the balancing feature of victron, Is there any way to disable this manually. As the electricity will be rather expensive tonight. My victron Idd is 700015.
If I set min SoC to 100% I also see the ‘battery balancing today’ in VRM but I don’t think that means the ‘periodic full charge override’ (PFCO) a.k.a. ‘balancing’ feature is activated and therefore neither the minimum 2 hours @ 100% that comes with it.
I would not be surprised this to be a VRM-GUI bug actually.
On our system PFCO gets enabled via a VRM-API call in Node-RED, to force a good few hours of maximum power charging, timed to catch the most ‘affordable’ price range of the day.
By not changing the minimum SoC setting, a new forecast schedule becomes visible in the VRM DESS schedule graphs showing us: when DESS expect to reach 100% SoC and what it plans after the (minimum) 2 hours ‘balancing’ time. But PFCO hardly ever stays enabled that long.
Depending on the (known) price forecast schedule (and other variables), PFCO will be disabled when the buy price rises towards to mean (minus half of the battery cycle cost), usually before reaching 100% SoC. When prices are very low, SoC may get close to 100% anyway at which point we deliberately allow charging to continue to 100% to do a cell balance check (and balancing if needed).
To circle back to your concern: as long as you do not activate the actual PFCO (in VRM DESS or by VRM-API makes no difference), I think you can safely ignore that ‘balancing today’ warning, it will disappear by itself (after resetting min SoC below 100%, as you most likely have noticed already).
I’m not completely sure how long that takes but when we enable or disable PFCO right on the full hour mark, it only takes a few (~7 to 8) minutes for DESS to reschedule based on the new actual SoC without that 2 hour balancing delay.
PS, check the Node-RED section to learn more about how we use VRM-API to schedule the (timed) PFCO.