All import slots showing green

[phiebs]

Hi, long time user of predbat here. I don’t tend to mess much with my setup as it works incredibly well after initial tweaking. Recently I’ve noticed all import slots being coloured green even though they are not all the same price. IOG user with fixed export (screenshot attached). I just wondered what could cause this as I’ve checked everywhere I can think of; I have no rate overrides nor appears to be any issue with the octopus integration etc. Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

[phiebs]

Just to add, it appears to still be functioning as I would expect, it’s just I’m used to seeing red on the high prices and green on the low.

[phiebs]

I've since noticed something strange - the plan will alternate between red and green for the peak rate, without any settings being changed in between. For example today at 12:40 it was like this:

and then at 18:35 when I checked it again it was like this:

I'd really like to get to the bottom of this, and not sure at this stage it warrants being submitted as a bug - but with zero changes to the setup/config file between these screenshots I'd expect it to be consistently red for peak rates unless something has changed recently that I missed in notes? @springfall2008 am I going mad?

[gcoan]

the plan will alternate between red and green for the peak rate, without any settings being changed in between

you said that nothing has changed, but what has changed is that time has advanced !

Predbat colours the import and export slots based upon the import and export rate thresholds, so as the plan rolls forward these can and do change

See explanation of the predbat plan and linked description of the thresholds https://springfall2008.github.io/batpred/predbat-plan-card/#understanding-the-predbat-plan

It's basically just part of the way predbat works and decides what it will do in each slot.

[phiebs]

Thanks, yes I had looked at the thresholds and surmised it must be something in there. I'm fairly certain it was the pool's heat pump that was making predbat think the load was super high (each days heating time is quite variable and can really skew things when the pool is in "get up to temp" mode). Since putting the ASHP into the iBoost (because that's effectively what it does, heats when there's plenty of solar) it seems to have brought the plan back in line.

[gcoan]

You can also use the car charging exclusion feature in predbat to exclude non-predictable load like your pool heat pump so that it doesn't get included in the house load prediction

[phiebs]

For anyone who lands here I may have figured it out. Recently connected a fairly large heatpump for my pool; it's managed outside of predbat but uses quite a significant amount of energy when on (2.5kW on top of my base of around 1.2kW). Usually it tracks the low electric rates and high surplus solar but occasionally I'll just leave it on to ensure the pool is warm for a specific time, regardless of cost. I think this was messing with the plan as today I noticed the house battery charging from the grid at peak rate for no apparent reason. I've since added the energy sensor for the heatpump into predbat in the iBoost section (although input_number.predbat_iboost_max_energy will only go to 30 but this can use upwards of 50kWh per day) and the plan seems to be stable and back to what I'm used to.
Still unsure if this is a bug as I wouldn't expect the high import rates to be green, ever. Plus it did pull a decent amount from the grid at peak times today even when the battery was full which again I would never expect unless there was an upcoming (worthwhile) saving session.

[springfall2008]

A debug yaml might help to figure out why its all green

[phiebs]

Yesterday I added the pool's ASHP into the iBoost area of PredBat. Now the plan is as I would expect and with the green/red so don't think a debug yaml would show anything now. Thanks for the reply but I believe I've gotten to the bottom of it. I guess super high loads (2x regular house load) that can range from 0 hours per day to 24 hours per day can really skew the calculation, I'm hoping by putting it in iBoost, predbat will be able to factor this in without messing with the plan.