Dear All

Anybody using the scheduled charge function on the Victron ESS function successfully? It seems quite straight forward to program but I can get it working! I want my batteries to discharge during early mornings to 40% SoC (its set on about 75% the rest of the time). This is to allow for deeper discharge early morning before the sun comes up and able to recharge batteries. If I set the SoC to 40% permanently then I run the risk that should loadshedding or other power failures occur during say 21:00 - 03:00 I will not have enough charge to reach the next day.

My system is updated to the newest software versions (Inverter, Cerbo etc.). I have read on the Victron community forums that it's common and can be due to time-zone not set to UTC. I have tried this but no luck!     

I've played around with it in the past and could not get it to work 'dynamically'. You are going to have to get NodeRed up and running to do what you explained above.

Yes you can do this with scheduled charge with the most recent GX firmware update (about 2 months ago iirc).  

Set your overall min SoC to the lowest you want your battery to go at any time while the grid is available (40% in your case).  Then set a scheduled charge from sometime in the afternoon near the end of your PV generation time for the number of hours to cover until you are willing to go below 75%.

In the scheduled charge set 75% as the charge level and enable self-consumption "from PV and battery".

Note that the scheduled charge will ALSO charge your battery from the grid up to the 75% level, if it is not already above this.  Since you don't want the battery below 75%, this should be fine and only actually charge the battery from grid if you have had too little PV yield that day.  

As an example, set the scheduled charge to start at 4pm and run for 10 hours.  Your battery will discharge to the 75% level during the evening, then you'll switch to grid until 2am, whereafter the battery will discharge again down to 40% potentially.  Adjust times and levels to suit.

Edited October 27, 20232 yr by Paulcupine

Thanks Paul, didn't know it changed in the last update. Will have a look at it again. Last time was more than a year ago.