New Octopus tariff for solar and battery users - Octopus Flux

Alnat1

Had lots of time to play recently as I'm laid up with my leg in plaster after an op. I'm new on Flux since clocks changed so been trying different things, below is where I'm at for now.

I import 2-5am but limit it to filling 60% SOC from grid. House runs off battery 5am until sun kicks in around 9am with my SW facing panels.

I limit my battery charging to 10% power rate, in order to stop the system capping too early, so get some export from around 10am. Usually around 1pm I can see load + export = 3.6kW and capping and I'll start upping battery charge rate bit by bit. 

Eventually battery will fill and system will flatline at 3.6kW. With too much time on my hands, if there's a big cloud I might discharge what I can to the grid. System is set to discharge 4-7pm down to 50% SOC but if the sun is out there's usually too much coming off the roof to allow any from the battery until around 6pm anyway.

Once the sun is a bit higher I think I won't need any 2-5am import, I'm not sure it saves much with losses in and out anyway.

Ron-ski

@Alnat1 Clearly they under specced your inverter, 3.6 on 5.25 of panels is crazy, I see this so often, lazy installers who don't want to do a G99. Of course its possible the DNO limited you, but I suspect it was the installers.

pensionpawn

Ron-ski said:

@Alnat1 Clearly they under specced your inverter, 3.6 on 5.25 of panels is crazy, I see this so often, lazy installers who don't want to do a G99. Of course its possible the DNO limited you, but I suspect it was the installers.

I have a 6kW inverter for a 7.12 kW array, however it's split 4 kWs due east and 3.12 kWs due west so combined it doesn't generate more than 5.8 (no clipping). Very good for the Flux peak export rate as the sun is SW - W over the three hour period today (and at 266.3 azimuth, 33.4 altitude at 17:30 on 16th June). Whatever trade you have visiting your house it's good to have an understanding of what they are about to do before they start work so that you can "assist" them during the install / acceptance test period. For example, knowing all about the new gas boiler that I had installed last autumn so I could tell them why it wasn't working properly and why they were also Muppets for not optimising the flow temp for the condensing mode.

EcoScruples

Magnitio said:

EcoScruples said:

Anyone care to go into detail what happens to their import/export/battery timeline?
I'm particularly interested what your battery does from sun up to sun down.

The settings I currently have are

So at 5AM the battery is 100% charged with the cheap rate Flux. It then slowly discharges until the sun comes out and PV output exceeds the load and any excess is exported. If we run a high load (e.g. kettle) then it will take some from the battery if needed. In the evening as PV drops, the battery starts discharging again. One thing that is useful with the Huawei inverter is that when PV output exceeds the inverter capacity (3.68kW in your setup) the excess is used to charge the battery (if not at 100%). Therefore you won't get clipping of generation. See below example for today:

Very briefly the output of the panels exceeded 5.5kW at around 11AM today, so the excess was fed to the batteries. Here's the PV and consumption from today as well:

I don't bother with exporting from the batteries at the higher evening rate; I'm not sure the difference is worth it when considering the impact it might have on battery life. I know others disagree, which is fine.

Hope this is of interest.

Makes perfect sense thank you, I'll give that a go and see how I do, I only have 4.29kw of panels but should do OK.
I use around 4kw from sun down to sun up normally and will need to change my water heating to benefit from more export but this should pay a lot more than I've managed so far.

EcoScruples

All signed up, hopefully not too long to get the changes in place then I can fiddle.

Officer_Dibble

I set to import to top the battery up to 30% between 0200 and 0500 and 1500 to 1600 (if it's below). I export down to 60% between 1600 and 1900 (if it's above) - seems to work, usually get a good bit of export at the top rate without specifically charging the battery just to get it. If there's a particularly gloomy forcast I increase the 30% figure, but it's usually enough.

powerful_Rogue

pensionpawn said:

I'm trying to apply for Flux however their website is not accepting my PNG / PDF file for the DNO proof, and I don't even understand why they need that anyway? My install was over 7 years ago and trying to find that info is almost impossible. Did anyone else have problems with this application process / uploads?

Nope, uploaded ,my PDF documents and it was accepted fine. Tried dropping them a message on Twitter? Seems to be the quickest way of getting a response.

pensionpawn

powerful_Rogue said:

pensionpawn said:

I'm trying to apply for Flux however their website is not accepting my PNG / PDF file for the DNO proof, and I don't even understand why they need that anyway? My install was over 7 years ago and trying to find that info is almost impossible. Did anyone else have problems with this application process / uploads?

Nope, uploaded ,my PDF documents and it was accepted fine. Tried dropping them a message on Twitter? Seems to be the quickest way of getting a response.

Thanks for your feedback. As I had been trying to do this most of the day it occurred to me that perhaps something had timed out without telling me? After refreshing the web page all was good. Started the week on Shell, finished on Octopus, which looks so much more sophisticated. Can't wait to try out all the possibilities of analysing the energy stats data.

EcoScruples

Confirmation today that Flux import will start tonight at midnight.
I assume Export will follow at the same time as you can't be on one without the other?

Time to start making some money.

powerful_Rogue

EcoScruples said:

Confirmation today that Flux import will start tonight at midnight.
I assume Export will follow at the same time as you can't be on one without the other?

Time to start making some money.

Export normally starts a few days later as the have to add this manually to your account.