LuxPower and Agile. Charging Strategies

[jmac]

Hi,

I wanted to start another thread to discuss charging strategies to help optimise the work already done by the authors of the various Octolux forks.

Recently, with low/no solar and prolonged agile 'peaks' its been quite challenging! My personal aim has been to keep my average down  (possibly at the expense of battery cycles in the short term - although the question of battery cycles is another discussion). So I thought I'd try to get the ball rolling:

Thoughts:

• Ability to reserve an amount of kW for the peak - variable according to length of peak?
• Ability to identify interim 'top up' opportunities

What are your thoughts?

[scobo]

To be honest, I'd be surprised if there were still many people currently on Agile given the crazy high pricing lately.
I was on it last year but switched to Go in September when the prices started climbing.
You can switch between the two tariffs once a month and it's easy enough to switch back if and when the pricing for Agile comes back down.

[kdmnx]

Octopus seem to have changed their “energy mix”. Plunges used to occur overnight in winter (driven by excess wind and low demand), now they seem to occur more often in summer sometimes in the day (driven by excess solar).

[biohead]

It's rather convoluted and much more manual than I'd like, but at the minute I'm going along the lines of get through the peak period - assume I'll cook during that period too - and then try to "allocate" the rest of the battery through the day slots by setting a min discharge threshold the day before (I've tweaked my octolux fork to define a max charge price and also a min discharge price).
I try to leave at least 20% between max charge and min discharge price so as not to cycle the battery too excessively.

However, given the recent price drops I'm now also adding a force discharge 17:30-18:30 where possible - but not to drop below 30% SOC. Once it gets to that stage it'll just go back to covering my house load for the last 30 mins of the peak.

That all goes out the window when it's a very good Agile export day (over 50p/kWh) - where I'll save 100% of the battery until the best 2-3 slots for exporting. I'll run off the grid the entire day in those cases than force discharge the battery.

Now that solar is improving, I need to revisit my octolux fork again on when to charge overnight or charge via Solar (easy if you're on fixed export, much more difficult on Agile export!).


Just to cover some of your basic points - I use an assumed baseload for my calcs of 400w. Given I'll have the TV on during the peak it's about right for my average baseload.
Although I have the newer US2000 batteries that allow 90% discharge, I've set my Lux to not drop below 20% SOC. Similarly, I usually cap grid charging to 90% via the Lux inverter directly - solar may top it up.
My octolux fork also modifies the hours to charge to go all the way upto 4pm - so if there's a cheap slot at 14:30 (which there has been recently) my code will charge the battery then rather than do a full charge overnight - I don't really do top-ups unless I've had a code failure overnight (often flakey wifi causes massive problems!) and need to intervene myself.