New to solar, how do I get to smart charge my battery (not OVO battery).

Sadly Ovo has just stopped Battery Boost so you’re only option is to change supplier!

Maybe Octopus.

I lived with the rather useless Battery Boost for longer than I should. Then OVO cancelled it.  It never worked with Charge Anytime anyway so an EV and battery combination was immaterial. 

Left OVO.  Went to Octopus IOG. With an EV get 6 hours @ 7p per hour for EV, house and battery that YOU control rather than handing over your battery to Kaluza (OVO in disguise).

Been with IOG for 6 months. Never missed a beat and never looked back. 

Go.

Hi ​@Guppy1970, good choice you’ve made…even if February is one of the darkest months of the year, you will notice a big difference to your electricity purchase over the coming months. I’m assuming you’re in the UK?

First off, the good news is that your inverter will (most probably, depending on your setup) automatically export excess production without your having to consciously plan (too much!) on a daily basis….I say “too much” because you’ll have to watch heavy loads like washing machine during dark days. Your installer will talk you through some of the financial benefits of producing a surplus.

Most solar panels in this forum rely on charging batteries, as you say, at off-peak, regardless of whether that’s necessarily cheaper per kWh purchased, and then running the house off a combination of battery/solar panel during bright hours including strategies at exporting production at the most profitable times.  There are some very slick, very smart strategies available, including responding automatically to household demand.  Depending on your daily usage profile, as you can imagine this requires battery or batteries of between a rather moderate 4kWh and a whopping 20kWh or basically as big as you can justify/as big as your UK panel array can reasonably and realistically expect to help with.

I take a rather opposite approach as I live in the NE of England (some days in Dec/Jan produce no solar panel output at all! (thankfully rare, maybe 2 or 3 days a year, but many Dec/Jan days are well under 1kWh) and because I’m still on the now sadly supplanted FiT payments scheme I can be less careful about when in any day I generate or when I export, and because I’ve only got a tiny 2.4kWh battery I’ve adopted a homemade and rather different approach: our (rather modest) terraced house lives all night (nearly 16 hours) off the small battery between 1630 and 0800 with all export forbidden by a small separate nighttime inverter.  This nighttime usage, mind you, does include a family upright fridge/freezer and a small chest freezer, and all the usual telly/lights/router/sneaky “vampire” stuff that one often forgets about (landline phone answering machine and handsets, outside PIR LED lighting, etc. for example).  My rather modest solar panel array of around 3.6kWh, installed many years go and accompanying Fronius inverter installed at same time and still going strong touch wood without a single penny maintenance, then kicks in and recharges the battery via a small plug in 24 volt charger as well as helping with any daytime loads such as washing or cooking…which we are very careful and miserly about!   That homemade nighttime system which I’ve been running for two years or more now means that for 16 out of 24 hours I buy nothing, and my worst winter months of Dec and Jan see an average total daily consumption of around 2 kWh.  During summer we buy perhaps 10 kWh monthly…but our needs as a retired couple are minimal:  we don’tt yet have an EV, and we rely on our woodburner for heating and most cooking.

I should imagine your installer has designed things around the more popular and sensible first method I’ve mentioned above, and I assume there will be specific financial strategies (eg SEG) built in towards recouping maximum payments for your surplus exported electricity; any specific questions based around the plan for your setup we’ll be glad on here to comment on and offer suggestions/experiences, loads of folk more experienced than I with optimising panel/battery/export.  Long story short, though, with solar panels and battery, you’ve made the absolutely correct decision and the outlook for your year ahead, especially now in Feb as we tentatively look towards Spring, is going to be great fun and will contribute hugely to reducing your electricity purchase.  
 

Very good luck to you, do please let us know what your outline production/export plan at the moment is? All the best, Walt