Posted by: @toodles

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@transparent I know it is relatively early days for such technology; I found that IOF needs further development and sent details to Octopus in the hope that their programmers would take my comments on board. I found that as my Tesla Powerwall system is able to export to the grid at a rate of 10kW, my battery was drained to the lower limit in a little over two hours; the problem then was that the system started to re-charge again at the peak rate and at the time when the grid is under greatest strain!

Such ‘whoopsies’ are not what one wants if you would have no means of taking back manual control! Regards, Toodles.

I've seen that happening quite a few times for both GE and Tesla PW3. GivEnergy being limited to 6kw, is a good thing and protects the battery from overheating as well as the strain on the local cable infrastructure. If they start discharging at 4pm sharp you may still be forced to charge during peak hours. Frankly speaking, I don't know why anyone would want to discharge at 10kw+ the strain on the battery and infrastructure is not good. I bet if you check your battery temperature when it does 9kw+ as the PW3 does, it will very likely hit 70c to 90c, especially during those Summer times. GivEnergy has a Smart Tariff option you can enable (look it up in the app, they need the Octopus API details), which allows you to select a few options, one being never charge the battery when it costs above 30p let's say. As far as I tested, does override the OIF which means no charging during peak hours.

Posted by: @majordennisbloodnok

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As far as I can see, the only people who’ll be put out by this are those trying to game the system; who want the extra discount on their rates (compared with non-intelligent Flux) but don’t want Octopus to have what they’re paying for through that extra discount.

Only to stop the most IT Illiterate people, and even that doesn't work if they use the GE Smart Tariff option (which would go away if/when GE are gone or stop cloud access), as it overrides OIF. But only when it acts against the basic setup, so charging at peak rate etc. See below, Kraken API is Octopus, and Smart Tariff is the GE overriding Octopus.

In my case OIF wanted to disable ECO Mode, which means that the battery wouldn't get charged from the Solar Panels outside of OIF allowed time slot. I get it, with OIF it doesn't really matter when you charge (except for PEAK) OR if it misses to charge the battery to 100% before 4Pm, which I've also had and so did my friend on PW3, only charging to 80% by 4Pm then discharging the whole battery before 7Pm, forcing the household usage to Peak electricity cost.

The other options to get around this would be to use either the GE official App or the Monitor for GivEnergy Inverter by Andrew Mille, Home Assistant etc, to set the schedule then unplug the Ethernet cable from the battery? I guess you could also block it in your Router setting if you can control DHCP settings. Same thing as unplugging the cable, just software based and I think you can still control it locally via the local apps, including the GE one.

@drei I wrote an email to Greg Jackson at the end of last week in which I mentioned I had tried IOF but that there were teething troubles that needed to be ironed out.

I explained that consumers without an EV but with relatively high capacity batteries, solar panels, heat pump and an all-electric household might well be using similar levels of energy to others who had access to the EV tariffs. I suggested that he and his team might give consideration to a tariff similar to EV rates / times for those in such a position please. One can but hope…. Regards, Toodles.