Stop winding down charge when Amber feed-in is curtailed

Feature Requests
1

I think I’ve found an issue for people who are on both Amber and Charge HQ when the solar feed-in tariff is negative so Amber is curtailing to local load.

I am on both Amber and Charge HQ, and we charge our PS2 and BYD Dolphin at home. Fronius 3 phase inverter and a BYD home battery. Based in Victoria.

I’ve noticed that on partly cloudy days, if I have Charge HQ on “Auto”, that it will sometimes slowly wind down and stay there even if the cloud goes away again. It will stick at say 6A charging. If I “kick” the system to “Charge Now” at 32A, then the inverter ramps back up again and Auto will then hold it there until the sun goes down unless the clouds come back.

I suspect - based on experience with control system optimisers in oil refineries - that what’s happening is that “Auto” doesn’t regularly test to see if more solar has become available.

Given that Amber now own Charge HQ, I’m wondering if the AI in Smart Shift could be used to send a signal to Charge HQ / the inverter every (say) 10 minutes to say “hey, it looks as if your solar array has spare capacity versus what we think you should have locally right now, and there’s a car plugged in on “Auto”, try ramping up the inverter a smidge and see if the load increases to absorb it all”.

A way of doing this would be to briefly switch the solar feed-in tariff to positive and see if the local load increases as the inverter ramps up, but there will be other ways.

Obviously this needs to be translated into the local control logic, but hopefully that’s clear enough for a human. If not, please contact me.
(Originally posted on the Charge HQ Facebook discussion group.)

2

Hi @john27rg . Thanks for your post. You have correctly identified an issue.

Amber’s EV control software, which is integrated into the Amber SmartShift app that also does battery control, handles this problem by disabling curtailment when the EV is charging. There are currently no plans to add active coordination between Charge HQ and Amber SmartShift - instead, the plan is to add support for more hardware to Amber SmartShift.

Currently, a workaround is to disable curtailment manually in Amber SmartShift when you want to charge the EV. It’s not ideal, because you also have to remember to re-enable it.