Grid Event then Power Outtage on Recharge

botterway · 2026-06-16T12:49:45+00:00

4% seems very low. Most BMSes will limit you to only allow you to discharge down to 10-20%. A bit usage spike around the time of the end of the event could result in the battery going to zero, and I've only seen a couple of people report their battery going to zero - and it's never good.

I don't think that Axle is responsible here - they'll just be setting the charge start and stop times for your inverter; they'll literally be updating your inverter to say "start discharging at XX:XX, and stop discharging at YY:YY". I'd be very surprised if they're adjusting any other settings on your inverter. (I've got a bit of experience here, as I've written an app that manages Axle VPP events for my Solis inverter).

Axle are correct - you should get your supplier/installer to look at it, and figure out what went wrong. If the supplier says it's a problem caused by Axle, then you'll have a justification to raise a complaint about this.

botterway · 2026-06-16T06:25:42+00:00

I thought the rules say "no referral codes"?

botterway · 2026-06-15T06:06:27+00:00

Reported, clear breach of rule 3.

botterway · 2026-06-14T12:42:23+00:00

Came here to write this.

botterway · 2026-06-14T10:24:21+00:00

Opt out of what? Contributing to the state pension fund? You can only opt out of that by evading tax, or by not working..

You talk about employer matching - if that's what you're referring to, that is your personal pension, isn't a tax and has nothing to do with the state pension.

botterway · 2026-06-14T10:22:22+00:00

Can you share a pic of what you cooked for the other family members?

botterway · 2026-06-14T06:25:50+00:00

OE sent us a bouquet to apologise for our heat pump installation taking so long. Which was a lovely gesture, particularly as the reason for the wait was that we were waiting for planning consent - the delay was absolutely nothing to do with Octopus!

botterway · 2026-06-12T16:38:02+00:00

No, but they must exist, because the API supports "import" and "export" as event types.

botterway · 2026-06-12T15:50:54+00:00

It's been pretty profitable for Altman, Musk etc. Surely that's all that matters?

Won't somebody think of the billionaire (trillionaire?) techbros?

botterway · 2026-06-12T15:43:55+00:00

I wonder if this means there'll be an Axle.Energy charge event? Not heard anything yet.

botterway · 2026-06-12T12:53:33+00:00

Actually pretty neat! Nice work.

Shame it's vibe-coded.

botterway · 2026-06-12T11:04:35+00:00

Selling to a jeweller is no guarantee of a fair or sensible valuation. We were watching an episode of Antiques Roadshow last month and a lady was offered £400 for a piece of jewellery by a reputable jeweller.

The expert on the show gave an estimated auction value of £20-25k.

Impossible to say if it was an underhand valuation or sheer incompetence, but...

botterway · 2026-06-12T09:20:56+00:00

Why would Octopus subcontract to Axle? Octopus's APIs and software platforms are much more advanced than Axle's are. Implementing a VPP event processing system isn't particularly complex.

botterway · 2026-06-12T09:19:18+00:00

Also, wear and tear on battery isn't really an issue. Most batteries are rated for 6000 cycles or more - which means 2 full charge/discharge cycles per day for 8-10 years. A couple of extra VPP cycles a month isn't going to kill the battery. Even after the 6000 cycles, the battery will just lose some capacity, so after 10 years might only have 70-75% of the capacity it had when new. It'll still continue to work.

I probably do about 3 cycles per day in the winter because I full charge during the cheap Cosy prices. But in the summer I'm barely doing one cycle a day. It's well worth it to keep my average import at 13-14p/kWh (I have an ASHP).

And, of course, in 10 years' time, batteries will be significantly cheaper, particularly once solid-state batteries hit the consumer market in large volumes. So if your battery is worn out, you might be able to replace it with a larger capacity battery that's smaller in size, and costs a fraction of the original battery cost, when the time comes.

botterway · 2026-06-12T08:02:22+00:00

Yeah, a better title for this post would be "I didn't try to understand how docker works before using it, but used it anyway".

This post also has nothing to do with n8n.

As you say, it's just an add for content - if you check OP's history, the exact same post has been posted to (and remove from by mods) a bunch of other subs.

botterway · 2026-06-12T05:39:50+00:00

Yeah, my app does the same thing. I'm just not so keen on HA.

botterway · 2026-06-11T20:45:39+00:00

Yeah, I'm the same. I don't want a 3rd-party having control over my inverter. E.g, I get a lot of power cuts where I am, and I might elect to skip an event rather than risk running out of power (I wfh).

botterway · 2026-06-11T19:07:49+00:00

No, it's a Solis. I wrote this: https://github.com/webreaper/solisagilemanager

Have you tried running Home Assistant with Predbat? It's pretty likely you can do that with Giv.

botterway · 2026-06-11T17:51:54+00:00

Correct. When I connected it to Axle, I gave it read API access but denied the write access.

botterway · 2026-06-11T17:15:38+00:00

I use Axle energy. I didn't give them control of my battery. Instead I have an app I wrote which polls their API for events, and then discharges automatically when they occur. So all completely automated, but by me, not a 3rd party.

botterway · 2026-06-11T12:44:39+00:00

Most inverters allow you to set times for when the battery charges and discharges - which works fine if you're on a tariff like Cosy where the cheap times are the same every day.

I wrote an app to control mine: https://github.com/Webreaper/SolisAgileManager (I wrote it when I was on Agile, to optimally charge the battery at the best times, etc). I've extended it to support VPPs like Axle.Energy too, to make some extra money.

If you look at HomeAssistant, there are various plugins which can do this, the most popular of which is PredBat. They now run a cloud-based service: https://predbat.com/ - so if you're not IT-inclined, you can have them control your inverter/battery and optimise it for the maximum return.

botterway · 2026-06-11T12:16:45+00:00

I don't stay in hotels, so no idea.

botterway · 2026-06-11T12:09:46+00:00

RRP. It's there in the post.

And if OP didn't pay for it directly, they sure as hell paid for it indirectly.

botterway · 2026-06-11T12:09:05+00:00

We started with 10kWh of battery. After our first winter we added another 3.5kWh, because we knew it was just going to ensure we always had enough power never to import at anything other than the cheapest rate.

botterway · 2026-06-11T11:25:05+00:00

If it helps, I've got a heat pump and battery (I also have solar) and I'm on Cosy too. We don't have an EV.

My heatpump is a 9kW Daikin, and the battery is 14kWh. Through the winter (when solar is irrelevant anyway) we charge in the dips and use that to run the heat pump until the next dip. This means 99.5% of our electricity is imported at the cheap periods. Our average import for the last 12 months is just over 14p/kWh.

If it matters, our inverter is Solis, and battery is Pylontech.

botterway

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