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thtruck avatar image
thtruck asked

ESS How to adjust Multiplus that it is only charging from grid when there ain't solar power?

ESS is feeding back to the grid and working fine but is still charging the batteries from the grid when there ain't enough solarpower. I want it to charge the batteries only in the night from the grid by scheduled charging and by daytime only with the mppt and not from the grid. When i set the multiplus in invertmode the grid gets lost and the feedin surplus solarpower stops feeding the grid. How can i setup ESS that it does what i want? Thanks in advance

battery chargingESSgrid
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2 Answers
Rob Duthie avatar image
Rob Duthie answered ·

Hi


You need to set up scheduled charging hours to do that. it is under the ESS settings page.

You can set it up to use no power from the grid to charge the batteries only from solar power not the grid and supply the house at night and not use the grid.


Regards

Rob D

NZ

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thtruck avatar image thtruck commented ·

Hello Rob,

Thanks but in my case with the latest updates installed i do not have such options in the ESS Scheduled Charge menu.

What i have is in the picture below and nothing more. Also within the scheduled hours the batteries stay charged from the grid when the soc of 95 is reached. It really doesn't matter. The only thing which changes is the title of the MultiPlus from 'Float' to 'Sched charge'

In the daytime when there is enough day/sunlight the feed in of the surplus solar power starts

but when there is not enough sunlight the charging power for the batteries comes from the grid again. I like to stop that and only charge from the grid in the scheduled hours..

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usernamepasswordbs avatar image
usernamepasswordbs answered ·

I have found one small problem already: when the sun came out earlier and I realised the battery was going to be completely full quite soon, i switched on some big consumers to use up the solar and some battery power. But the power was drawn exclusively from PV and grid only. Then I remembered that it wouldn't discharge the battery at all when theoretically charging. So I had to cancel the scheduled charge.

Back to the drawing board.


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nofearangel avatar image nofearangel commented ·

Good Day

I have a similiar issue. My system will start charging from midnight slowly which in my opinion is an absolute waste because by 10am its charged to 80% and no PV energy was used. I have also set a schedule to charge the battery in the afternoon from 1pm for cloudy days. I want the system to charge on PV other than the set schedule, I want only grid power when its cloudy and system cannot charge from PV. This does not seem like an easy thing to set. I also selected Optimized without batterylife. Seems battery life also interferes and wants to charge it whenever it hits the limits. I do not mind the batteries charging to 100% every day, I do not want it charging to 80% off grid at 8am in the morning.
@usernamepasswordbs If you set the stop charge on SOC will that not allow your battery to discharge while you are charging it?


4.4.3. Stop charge on SoC

When a SoC limit is set for a scheduled charge window, charging will stop when the batteries reach the requested SoC. The batteries will however not discharge until the scheduled charge window ends. The goal is to be at or near the requested SoC at the end of the scheduled charge window.
https://www.victronenergy.com/media/pg/Energy_Storage_System/en/configuration.html

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usernamepasswordbs avatar image usernamepasswordbs nofearangel commented ·
As it says there "The batteries will however not discharge until the scheduled charge window ends" so you are not able to draw current from batts if they are on a scheduled charge even if at 100% and the sun is shining.


At the moment (depths of winter) I charge at night (12am until 6am) to 90% on cheap rate electricity so by 9 or 10am when PV charging starts the battery is down to 60 or 70% and then it really depends on the sun. A good clear day and I can put on dishwasher / washing m/c etc and still charge batts to 100%.

Mine seems to have stopped charging randomly from grid in the daytime which was why I wanted to use Scheduled charge in the first place. Maybe the system was 'learning' my habits or balancing the newly-installed batteries or something but it seems (fingers crossed) to be o.k. now.


I have it on optimised with battery life and I have recently lowered the minimum SoC from 20% to 10% but I find that the Active SoC limit (which is set automatically) won't let it go below 30% anyway.



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