Fox Inverter & Cube Batteries with Agile Octopus

[adm]

I am hoping to gain some knowledge from people here on the forum....

I had an installation company around yesterday to do a survey and provide me a quote for a PV/Battery system.

Previous companies had recommended Tesla Powerwall for the battery and most recommended SolarEdge inverters.

But this company recommended a Fox inverter and a Fox Cube battery system.

One thing that came out in the conversation, was that they told me that the Fox system could be set up to work automatically with the Agile Octopus tariff. This is particularly interesting to me as one of the downsides of the Powerwall is that it is limited to 4 time periods for different tarrifs, and would need to be manually updated every day if I wanted to benefit from Agile Octopus.

However - this installer told me that Fox and Agile work together. The Fox software would access the Agile API every evening, take the later data on the half hourly tariff costs and would set the system to charge the battery during the 5 (maybe 7, 8 etc...) cheapest times during the day and night - and could also be set to export at the highest export tariff times.

This is exactly what I want my final system to do. Automatically read the different tariffs for each half hour and then set charge discharge times appropriately.

So the big question.....is this true?

Thanks in advance!

[Dave Foster]

Will has done a video explainer, have a look at this - hopefully answers all your questions.

[adm]

Thank you.

That kind of shows that it might work.....and hopefully has gone through some more development since the video, so I am positively encouraged.

I'd like to see more about things like how to set up different strategies - for example, "charge my battery at any rate lower than 10p/kWh, and then export at anything over 13p/kWh", or "use the 5 lowest priced import slots during the day to charge my battery, and use the 5 highest priced export slots to discharge".That kind of thing.

But all in all, if this kind of capability is really available now, it will almost definitely make me choose Fox over Tesla for the battery system. The modularity and expandability is also of course a decent bonus too.

Thanks again.

[Dave Foster]

Just to mention as well as the facilities that Fox are providing for agile, if you have some technical skills or have a family member that does, the Fox system supports a modbus connection - many people have set up a home assistant on a micro computer and that allows you to do pretty much anything you can think of.

I don’t personally use agile but I know people who do and use home assistant which will allow you to set your system to charge at the lowest rates, take into account solar forecasts, home usage etc…

I do use Octopus Intelligent however which charges my car randomly at the best times for the grid, and with my home automation it interfaces to Octopus and sets my inverter charge times to match - just set and forget.

[adm]

Well, I used to be an electronic engineer, so wouldn't have any fear of messing around with microcomputers and modbus connections - and would probably enjoy it.

But I can't write code though....

But if the Fox system will interface intelligently with Agile, then it could be exactly what I want. Tesla doesn't allow this at the moment.

I think the Fox system will also be a little more efficient too as the Tesla Powerwall is AC coupled, so there is an extra inverter involved if I am thinking about it correctly.