You’re quite right, above all it needs to be simple! The beauty of WW is that it’s largely automatic when set up, and the time-slot grid makes it very intuitive to manually add or remove slots on an ad-hoc basis.

I’m going to run for a few days with multiple Charge windows and see how I get on (23:00-06:00[hold charge] & 06:00-23:00[discharge]). Obviously I’ll lose out on the optimal selection of low-cost slots, but hopefully this won’t be significant.

I am concerned that this approach still doesn’t stop my house battery occasionally dumping into the car, in situations when the last automatic slot ends before the car is fully charged. The only real solution to this would be your suggested ‘exclusion hold-charge' window in the Advanced tab?

admin

Tell me to shut up, but how about keeping the ‘Agile Octopus’ side bar simple and adding another side bar duplicating it but include the greater flexibility as discussed above with the bells and whistles added? Call it ‘Agile Octopus Pro’ or something.

  • Mat likes this.

    admin

    admin hi can I be signed up using this email please
    **@gmail.com

          Annie Hi - you should already have access if you signed up, which it looks like you have.

          You can access the Agile Octopus integration from the menu.

            admin I'm sure this may have been discussed but will there be a monetary based charge option instead of timed . I've only been playing with charging and discharging batteries for a few days and I'm not great at this kind of thing but as far as I can work out you will have to go in every day and change the charge/ discharge slots depending on price change ? What most of us need I feel is an option to fill at lowest prices , sell at highest prices , I know some people are really tech savvy but those of us that aren't spend ages trying to configure all these things 😊

                Annie

                What most of us need I feel is an option to fill at lowest prices

                That can be done, and people are using it exactly like you describe, you simply configure your Agile Charge window, see screengrab below:

                sell at highest prices

                That's usually simply the 16:00-19:00, slot right? You can just configure that in the Schedules section as a regular Export.

                  4 days later

                  I am finding the app really useful for taking advantage of the cheapest slots to charge up my battery.

                  Looking ahead to the return of the sun, how about showing an estimate of solar production for the next day, and better still showing it for each 30 minute Octopus Agile slot?

                  This would help users understand what is going on and to tweak their charging schedules. And it would also allow you to gather feedback and improve the algorithm for estimating solar production.

                  Thanks

                    kerregan Showing general estimation for the next day is definitely a good idea.

                    In terms of doing it for every half hour, I think it's a bit of a mug's game TBH.

                    It would give the impression that it can be relied upon at that level of granularity, and people would ask questions if it was too far out, if they made a decision on charging or not charging based on that.

                      In mid summer it is (almost) always sunny enough to be generating. In mid winter it is (almost) never sunny enough to be generating. In between there are some days with sunny spells. For example yesterday I was surprised by good sun from 10.00 till 13.00.

                      I accept that trying to estimate generation per half hour could be overkill. But how about highlighting, across the half hour schedules, periods where sun is forecast? I have a Tado heating system, and this is what the Tado app does.

                        kerregan That’s not a bad shout. We can look into that for sure. Will need some changes and more weather API calls, but could be a useful indicator.

                          Hello! I have been using WonderWatt for a few days now and really like the goals of the application, thank you for developing it.
                          I'm on Octopus Agile and have found WW's identification and programming of the cheap slots to work well. However, the WW strategy for these slots is slightly different to how I was setting them manually - I was setting each time slot and its upper SOC% goal. This would mean that once the battery had reached its goal during the time slot the lower-cost grid would still be active for my load shifted appliances. The WW scheme seems to be reliant on my having set the time slot's SOC% target but this loses one of the advantages of the regular WW scheduled scheme: to modify the SOC% according to the following day's sunshine forecast. It would be great if WW could bring that functionality to the Agile programming scheme. Thank you.

                            Prior to using WW I had two charge slots. Looking at the logs it seems WW only sends instructions re AC charge slot 1, leaving charge slot 2 untouched. I think this means charging is kicking in during the old slot (1-4pm) even when WW is chosing specific half hour slots in that period. Guessing I should manually delete the second charge slot on the Giv portal?

                              freakouthtesquares

                              Guessing I should manually delete the second charge slot on the Giv portal?

                              Yep, we're only rotating one slot and not touching the others - for a variety of reasons, including inverter differences as well as minimising our inverter control 'footprint'.

                              Good point though, should probably add something to the FAQ.

                                4 days later

                                Setting a maximum soc target at the end of the charging period on Agile tariff would be a great addition, along with an indication of next days total solar generation forecast.

                                Not sure setting max soc target per 30 minute slot is required as I've not found the cost difference between 6-8 slots isn't that much (of course we all like to save as much as we can, but not at the cost of extra complexity in WW).

                                Having WW set the maximum soc target automatically based on solar forecast is the ideal solution, but I'd still like to have an over-ride based so I can set my own maximum soc target.

                                9 days later


                                Curious as to why the hold instruction at 05.01 was sent twice, 2 seconds apart.

                                terrible-guidance

                                  kerregan Yeah, looks like there's an edge case where on the back of some of our recent changes, duplicate slots can be created.

                                  We'll get a fix out.

                                    exhausted-native
                                    Could I request a feature to hold charge during a charge window? I've seen the hold charge between slots, but I would like it to always use grid power when in a charge window if I have selected it. So what happens is, say I set a charge window between 0100-0300 becase its 5p/KW at 0200 my battery is full so it stops charging and goes back to running on the batter for the last hour, so I don't exit at 0300 with 100% charge. However, when I set charge windows in the actual GivEnergy app, it will fill up the battery and maintain it at 100% until that slot ends. So i guess it is changing the discharge mode?

                                    The reason I think this would need a toggle per agile charge window is because I use the usually much cheaper overnight and also have a charge before the afternoon/tea time spike in prices, here I would want it to just top it up and then go back to running off of the battery like it does now.

                                    As always, thank you.

                                      Jeff This is what it is supposed to do, yes.

                                      I do think though that there is a scenario where some of this wobble still goes on due to the fact we set discharge power to 0, and depending on inverter gen etc this might not be actioned or at least there still is some discharge wobbles going on from time to time, see thread here:

                                      https://community.wonderwatt.com/d/104-dont-use-battery-during-off-peak-setting-not-working/11

                                      We'll be sorting out a fix for that and set the DC discharge enabled flag to false, which will hopefully sort this issue and result in a better hold-charge experience.