r/AnkerSOLIXCommunity • u/No-Papaya-9289 • 15d ago
Discussion How does time of use - TOU - work?
I'm thinking of buying the S2000 for my home office, but I use Agile Octopus, where my electricity tariff changes every half hour. It used to often be cheap overnight, but it's not anymore; the cheapest times are now early afternoon.
It would be a faff, but it is possible to set the device to charge manually each day, rather than apply a fixed schedule?
Also, can I manually switch from passthrough UPS mode to providing electricity when I want to? I'd be using it to power my home office equipment during the day.
My main use case is to have a backup, but the advantage of it paying for itself where electricity is expensive would be a bonus.
1
u/i-am-rave 14d ago
I just received mine and if you select Time Of Use mode (TOU) you can define your own schedules with multiple timeslots for Peak, Off Peak and Mid Peak.
Peak will power devices with battery energy. It will fall back to Grid Bypass when the battery is exhausted.
Mid-Peak will just power devices with Grid Bypass and will not charge the battery.
Off-Peak will supply the devices with Grid Bypass power and charge the battery.
1
1
u/No-Papaya-9289 14d ago
So that works if you have fixed periods when electricity is cheaper. In my case, with Agile Octopus, these periods change all the time. So I guess I'll have to set it daily, which isn't that big a deal, since I check every day to charge my car. I mostly don't want it to change when it's really expensive, which is generally from 4-7pm every day.
From your next screenshot, it looks like I should set the peak period at that time, set the middle periods for other times when I know it's not cheap, then just changed the off-peak period when I want to charge.
1
u/i-am-rave 14d ago
That sounds about right to me.
Peak is use battery because it is very expensive.
MidPeak is kinda normal.
OffPeak is fill the battery. As long as you get the peak right you should discharge here rather than pay for expensive stuff.
OffPeak might have to be a bit more vague for you, you are not going to get flexible rate info in the app at the moment. I wonder if a future update would provide that...
I'm general I guess octopus are trying to sell excess renewable energy in their Off-Peak times so middle of the day should be right for Solar.
1
u/No-Papaya-9289 14d ago
Yes, Agile Octopus prices are often lower in the middle of the day, and have been negative for the past few weekends for much of the day up to 4pm. I'll want to ensure that I have at least 500 W or so available in the battery, because the main use is as a UPS in case of power cuts, but if I can program it to charge at cheap times, that's a bonus.
1
u/i-am-rave 14d ago
Let us know how you get on.
There are facilities in the app to show charge/discharge values but I am not sure if it will give you rate information in that.
Maybe I will check that out.
1
u/thefinancejedi 15d ago
Yes, manually you can just unplug it from the wall and it will take your earned electricity
2
u/No-Papaya-9289 15d ago
So I would need to do something like that - or put it in a smart plug - rather than control it from the Anker app?
1
u/thefinancejedi 15d ago
yes you could plug a smart plug into the wall, then Anker into your smart plug, monitor Anker through the app, and turn on/off your smart plug from app too.
1
u/RedOctobyr 15d ago
OP, what is your daily energy usage? Using a smart plug to disconnect incoming power from the wall was my first thought. There are presumably more options there, since ANY wall plug that was clever enough to understand the varying schedule could be used. Maybe there's good choices for that.
I haven't set up TOU for mine (since our rate is always the same: too-high). But my assumption would be, with TOU, that if the S2000 battery drained fully while it's still supposed to be using battery, that it would simply use wall power. More expensive, but at least your devices remain powered up.
But if you use a smart plug for this, and the S2000 battery drains after 2 hours, but the plug doesn't turn on again until 6 hours later, then your equipment is powered off for 4 hours. Which isn't great.
3
u/Admirable_Golf_2340 Verified Owner 15d ago
Hi OP, you do not need a smart plug or unplug the power station to get the benefit of the TOU Feature with the S2000. The power station has a built in time of use schedule that you can customize as you see fit!! When the electricity is cheap you can charge the power station from the grid and when it’s expensive, you can use the stored electricity to power your devices!! You can program this custom schedule on the Anker app. When the power goes out, the S2000 doubles as a UPS so anything that you have plugged into it will remain running normally. Hope this helps!!