Agile Charge Window - SOC less than logic Q's

johalareewi

As the time approaches the 4pm-7pm peak period, I want to add an Agile charge window (say from 2pm to 4pm) which says that, if the battery SOC is going to be less than nn% at 4pm then schedule some cheap charge slots to get SOC up to nn% by 4pm.

Can this be done with the current Agile setup using the SOC feature?

admin

johalareewi Not currently.

It would need some prediction in terms of average usage, which would be hard to predict, especially when factoring in the odd white goods appliance being turned on between 2PM-4PM....

Trouble is, even if we were to build it in, we get it wrong a fair bit of the time.

The best person to know this would be yourself, so I think you'd select the odd cheap slot and save, no?

admin

johalareewi We had another suggestion on this, to possibly combine it with a check 'Price per kWh less than' setting.

But again, prices fluctuate so much, you would have to possibly tweak it every day, and you could easily shoot yourself in the foot and it won't have topped by 16:00 because of this threshold.

The more complexity we introduce, the harder it becomes to manage.

johalareewi

admin That is what I currently do.
I was seeing if I could have a backstop rule for when I wasn't able to manually trim things.
I tried overlapping Agile Charge Windows (same charge period) with different SOC values but that isn't allowed.
The Agile Scheduler does make this easier than using the GE app plus Octopus Agile Rates page. :)

johalareewi

admin combine it with a check 'Price per kWh less than' setting.

There is a setting in the advanced bit but I left that at 0.

One thing I do manually is if there is a slot coming up that is cheaper than the 2 following slots, then do a 1 slot charge (so i end up paying the cheap slot rate for 3 slots. A 1 slot charge lasts me about an hour). After the peak period where the battery is low, and there are frequently odd low slots in the evening which can boost the battery until the cheap overnight rates start..

johalareewi

I have set up a test agile charge window for 14:00 to 16:00.
If SOC is below 50% then schedule 2 cheapest slots.
The scheduler has selected 2 slots but at the moment, I am not expecting the SOC to be below 50% by 2pm so I guess these will be skipped.
Will se what happens.

johalareewi

johalareewi
Interestingly, wonderwatt checked the SOC at the start of the automatically selected charge slot (14:30) rather than the start of the agile charge window (14:00).

jjb

johalareewi I have the same set up and it is working well for me. It will skip the charge if the battery % is already achieved.

admin

johalareewi Yep, it does evaluate at the start of a charge slot, but if you have adjacent charge slots, because they get condensed to one big charge slot internally, the condition won't be re-evaluated at each half hour interval.