"Use battery off-peak" - manually specify discharge rate

psiloc

Hi again,

I'm not going to inundate you with tedious feature requests; this is my last one :)

I was wondering if we could have an option to manually specify the discharge rate in the "use battery off-peak" section of the smart charging setting.

I was thinking it would make it trivial, even for EV owners, to continue to use their battery to power their home in the summer months without accidentally discharging their home battery into the EV. All you would have to do is specify a discharge rate of whatever the base load of the home is. Anything over that would be considered a deliberate off-peak action, such as charging a car, running a heat pump or what have you.

You could make it as straightforward as "I have an EV" checkbox that reveals a "base load of home" field for the user to fill in. It won't be as perfect as having the battery automatically track the house load like it normally would, but it would be close enough considering the amount of energy used by the car

admin

psiloc Right, because the discharge rate would be capped, the car won't be able to pull that from the battery, good suggestion!

psiloc

As an aside - and 100% this may not be worth the extra complexity - but if you knew the base load of the house along with the solar forecast, current SoC, battery size and daily use values, it would theoretically be possible to automatically calculate whether to smart charge the battery as it does now, or on the complete opposite side of the spectrum, allow it to discharge even off-peak to meet the house load.

You wouldn't need the "battery is at least" or "solar forecast is at least" settings - you could theoretically calculate that there should be enough battery to meet the house load until the sun rises and then furthermore enough solar to fully charge the battery.

I accept that this is putting even more pressure on the solar forecast being accurate haha.