Very interesting. I used charger integration on my Zappi 2 and like you it went very quick. So far I haven't had a charging session outside the cheap period. I've set the battery to charge during the cheap period and the ready by 5 30
Also just switched to intelligent. There no longer seems any point in charging the car using surplus solar as export price is higher than the overnight import rate.
You can stop any drain which happens after your cheap rate (after 5.30am) by telling the App you want the car to be ready by 5.30 - I've never had a charge session organised after the 'ready by time' I tend to plug in after 10pm so even if you get an early charge session, my battery will refill overnight so it's not a big deal as we always fill the battery to 100% to maximise the chances of solar export at 15p per Kw the following day.
I've been on the intelligent tariff since May. If my car is plugged in waiting it will randomly charge to balance the grid.which in turn gives me cheap rate for using in the home. Happens most weeks at some point 😊
Nigel, I've fully automated my system with Home Assistant using the Octopus Intelligent Dispatch sensor to put my battery into backup mode so it doesn't discharge into my ev during the additional cheap smart charge periods - no manual input, other than plugging the car in, required. I think this is a better solution than limiting the inverter output and manually having to adjust things.
I now have permanent answer of how to avoid battery drain during bonus hours. You have to separate the supply to the EV on its own cable feed via a split fuse board and place the CT clamp round the feeder cable prior to the CT from the inverter, which in effect means the inverter can not see the EV and therefore can not introduce batteries to feed the EV and also may prevent Solar feeding the EV, but for me I would rather have the Solar going back the grid for 15p rather than saving 7.5p to feed the EV especially as the bonus hours are at 7.5p the same as off peak This method means you do not have to manage the issue At the moment only one downside, the inverter is not registering EV charging, but Zappi does and if you want to make sure your bonus charge is at the correct rate the Octopus screen shows that
Hi Nigel, great live video, i enjoyed watching it. I had the same quandry about going to octopus intelligent in October and i missed the email too! I have the added complication of having bought some Kirk hill wind farm shares so limited to which providers i can use. Luckily i found E-on offering a 7 hour (eco 7) tariff for 9.5p/kwh. This slightly higher than Octopus but this is cancelled out by the 16.5p/kwh export available if you are on the e-on next drive tariff. I have 36kw of pylontech us5000 connected to 11kkw of solar and hoping next summer will make up the loss. I also have a large 16 kw heat pump which i can run from midnight to 7am without discharging the batteries. The faff of additional slots has put me off intelligent and i am now fixed for 12 months with E-on.
Great to hear Zappi is now working with Intelligent Octopus. I had put my name in the list but no response yet. I would love to swap to the Zappi integration as I feel it will be far easier to keep using spare solar or the grid with IO charge sessions.
As an aside, I'm semi-regularly getting extra charge slots well outside the standard Intelligent window. And remember your incoming rate for the whole house drops too, not just for the car charging. I just wish there was a way you could know in advance when the extra slots are available via the Octopus API, both from the point of view of avoiding battery drain, but also so other usage can be planned for those slots, especially as we go into the winter and less excess solar is there for the taking.
I have a similar installation to yours and I cannot get the car to charge off excess Solar through my Zappi but as my charging at night is fine. Was not sure why you highlighted cheap rate during the day for the rest of your house as I would have thought with your Solar and batteries you rarely use on peak
@@mikejoseph425 drawing from the battery involves losses and a small amount of battery wear, so if you can get cheap slots during the day, you avoid both of those. Also my 9.5kwh battery can only supply 3kw, so heavy appliance use (washing machine, tumble dryer, dishwasher, vacuum, kettle, toaster, microwave, iron) needs to be staggered to avoid peak grid draw. If you have a cheap slot during the day, you can use as many appliances concurrently as you like, without paying peak rates, which is great if you need to have a housework blitz.
Not sure if you can get an intergration via Zappi or car but I use node-red on GX with Tesla intergration so when the location is at my home and the car is charging it switches the ESS into charging mode and then back again when charging stops. the MyEnergi node-RED intergration used to not be that great for control but gave status so should be able to detect charging out of off-peak time and trigger what you need.
Great to hear that the Zappi beta testing is going well. I’ve connected via my Tesla, rather than the Zappi for the first time earlier this week and it is working well bar a couple of teething issues. 👍 New export rate is brilliant too!
Really useful stuff Nigel. Hoping to get an Enyaq next year with a Zappi 2.1 on Intelligent so any information about how it all comes together is really great. We also have 4.3kWp of solar with an 8.2kWh GivEnergy battery so the tips about using Home Assistant to prevent battery drain are also really useful. Thanks!
Really interesting thanks! My car isn't compatible at all, so I've stuck with Go, which isn't that much more expensive. It's good to see the zappi integration is coming and looks to work well already.
Great pioneering work. Thanks for keeping us up to speed. Still waiting on my solar upgrade and hp install before I do any more tinkering with settings or tariffs. Go is fine for now for me. Passed your video onto a pal who was trying IO and mini-Zappi combo. Hope it helps him.
I've heard lots of people have it working and from my test charge it should be fine for most . Zappi is definitely the better option than mini connection
It appears that Victron are soon to release a VRM update containing new dynamic ESS functionality. I received an email a week or so ago inviting me to attend a webinar. Extract from the email - "Description Soon there will be an important VRM feature for ESS systems that are located in countries that have dynamic energy pricing. This update will bring them Dynamic ESS. This uses an algorithm to determine the optimal target SOC for the battery, taking the dynamic pricing, solar forecast and expected consumption into account." This could be a very useful new feature arriving in the near future.
Nice video! I had issues turning on Intelligent Octopus on my VW ID.4 but that was because location services were disabled (by default?) in the car but quickly sorted. I'm also running Home Assistant. Have you tried the Octopus integrations, both the official one and there is an Octopus Intelligent specific one? The Octopus Intelligent integration has a state for "smart charge" active and allows you to set the SoC / ready time as the app does directly from Home Assistant. I use an automation to stop the car charge when it's plugged in (using the VW+Octopus integrations together), sometimes Octopus takes 5 mins or so to do this costing a small amount of peak rate energy each time and using Home Assistant is much faster. For your battery/inverter scenario though, the main Octopus integration gives you the current rate - this changes to ~7.5p when the smart charge is active (even outside of 23:30-5:30), so you could write an automation that e.g., when rate goes less than 10p -> change the max inverter power to 400w, when rate goes above 10p -> change the max inverter power to max. You could also do this dynamically as I know you have power monitoring on house loads...
On the Megakid octopus-energy-intelligent-tariff intergration there is a simple binary sensor which is on or off depending on the rate. You also get a breackout of the indivual charging slots as a planned dispatch slot entity which is great. This has proved really reliable and simple for my automations.
If you have the octopus intelligent HomeAssistant integration it includes a switch which knows when smart charging is happening so you can use that as a trigger for your inverter max setting.
@EVPuzzle yes I have finally integrated the Indra on a charge via both the car and the charger being controlled by Octopus 🐙 so now I can just plug in in the day and see if I get any extra goodies lol
@EVPuzzle I can confirm they are switching the Indra on the day it is working great just wish Victron could see this and also charge the batteries at the same time lol
The requirement for a test charge is being removed from the Zappi intergration because the telemetry from the Zappi is good enough from the moment you connect up.
I have a Zappi 2 and I am desperate to get on the IO tariff, mostly for the extended and cheaper overnight tariff (for overnight heating and car/home battery charging). Also, I have a Givenergy battery and they used to have a tie in with Octopus. The ability to take energy off the grid when there is a surplus would be awesome - are there any tariffs for that? There is the Agile tariff, but you don't get guaranteed overnight cheap elec. Any thoughts anyone?
So your battery won’t drain when charging the car you could set battery minimum charge level at the level it’s at, at that time of starting car charging.
I'm new to EV's, a VW ID3, just had a Zappi 2.1 and a Harvi installed, set to Eco+ and on Octopus Intelligent Go. First night charge, by 02.30 the charge was just a trickle and obviously wasn't going to reach 80% so I switched to fast charge, it immediately went up to 7.2Kw and stayed there from 03.00 till 05.00 when it stopped and the tick appeared. Then for a reason unknown to me it started again at 06.00 and used my solar battery till 06.30. I have a Huawei solar set up with battery, I have set the battery to charge only from 23.30 till 05.30 and discharge only for the rest of the day. If I'm right, I can set the Zappi to a schedule charge from 23.30 till 05.30 in the 'fast' mode and this should do the job? Anyone have any advice please?
I also have the Eddi and Zappi with a Victron multiplus2... I created a couple of automations, within Home Assistant, that detect the power use on either the Zappi or Eddi when above 200W. This sets the inveter output to being 300W maxoutput.. Once this has dropped below 100W for 2 minutes it then reverts back to full power this I have set to being 3000W.. examples below of the yaml Automation1 alias: ZappiOrEddiUseDisBatt description: Restrict the inverter when charging car or heating water trigger: - type: power platform: device device_id: Zappi entity_id: zappi-internal-load domain: sensor above: 200 - type: power platform: device device_id: Eddi entity_id: eddi-internal-load domain: sensor above: 200 condition: action: - device_id: Victron-settings domain: number entity_id: ess-maxdischarge type: set_value value: 300 mode: single Automation2 alias: ZappiOrEddiUseEnaBatt description: Unrestrict the inverter when charging car or heat waterfinished trigger: - type: power platform: device device_id: Zappi entity_id: zappi-internal-load domain: sensor below: 100 for: hours: 0 minutes: 2 seconds: 0 - type: power platform: device device_id: Eddi entity_id: eddi-internal-load domain: sensor below: 100 for: hours: 0 minutes: 2 seconds: 0 condition: action: - device_id: Victron-settings domain: number entity_id: ess-maxdischarge type: set_value value: 3000 mode: single
I have a Zappi and started the beta last night, test charge worked fine, but.... couldn't charge my storage batteries last night, so i now have a garage full of flat (Sunsynk)batteries that I cannot charge. Why that has anything to do with IO I have no idea, I just know it all worked before the switch over. So its costing me big time now as I'm using the grid all the time.
@@EVPuzzle GivEnergy Battery, it's in the devices section of the application, and you have to give them access to it. Just seems that they are messing up the efficiency, I also tried adding an additional power user, Octopus didn't like that.
It asks you for what vehicle you've got and how much SoC to give it. Time to charge is still a bit simple, it just assumes based on charger type. In the future it will take other parameters
I have a VW eUP and Zappiv2 and just started on IO. Integration to the car seemed to work initially but then failed. Seems to be working after deleting and readding. Seems to take 3kw before stopping charge though from plug in, so not sure if that will be at cheap rates?
Hi Nigel, do you (or anyone else on the IO / Zappi beta trial) know whether it works in a household with two Zappi’s, and is triggered by plugging in on either?
Thanks. Not big deal if not, to be honest. One of the two is used most of the time, the other is only occasionally needed, so we’d just make the primary one the IO connected one and leave the other with a boost timer.
Does the Mini not have WiFi? Even my 2019 Hyundai diesel has WiFi and connects when I arrive home and when I'm leaving long enough to update it's traffic and maps data. Surely the Mini doesn't rely on 4G only?
They need to ship this ASAP - there's no longer a financial reason to spend £1k on a Zappi for solar divert, with Outgoing Octopus rates going higher than overnight incoming rates.
I’ve just switched over, it’s failing because of the charger, I had my Indra fail to charge as octopus can’t integrate so I had to turn on schedule on the charger in the off peak times so octopus can see the car.
@@EVPuzzle mine worked at first then had to go back and do something and it didn’t intergrate again so I did a boost on the charger, then in the night didn’t charge at all so had to turn on the schedule on the charger it’s self that way Octopus can tell the car but I can’t get the bonus day change I’ll wait for my charger integration I’ve asked them to add
@@EVPuzzle any idea how to set it up again? As I just found out that octopus have the charger listed as the model not the manufacturer, so I need to run the setup again
@@DTech101 I've been going to the App and clicking on the intelligent section which takes you through the setup as if your re applying for it. It recognises you're already on it but sets up the device
@lesmotor2 no it isn’t vehicle to home when I spoke to them they said it’s underway, they may have said it’s a year or two out, but anyone with an Indra would qualify for a discounted rate. It is but Octopus call it a Smart Pro as the manufacturers name and the model
Hey Nigel. I've just switched to Intelligent too. However, after setting the schedules for my Ohme charger the car just charged as soon as I plugged it in... What I cant see are the planned charging pattern to fulfill my schedules. You seemed to say you can see these in advance... where could you see them?
If you are on iOS, it will pop up a notification with the extra charging times. You then press and hold on the notification to view the extra charge times
Google notifications from the octopus App and in the octopus App. If you adjust the settings in the App it typically responds with an updated provisional schedule quickly . It can and does change
@@barrydonaldson just the one octopus energy app, is it up to date? Does it show the device tab below with your zappi? Are Google notifications on for the app and phone
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Good information thanks I have just got on octopus intelligence go zappi beta but it’s Using my battery 🪫 and throwing an error up on my zappi but I haven’t got a ct clamp on my Tesla to zappi to cover my only 2 to cover my grid and Solar ct clamps have you got a ct for your battery
