Solis - force grid charge on and off

[durkimat]

Hi all,
I am looking for a way to forge charge from grid on my solis inverter depending on the state of a binary sensor. My actual use car is in on intelligent octopus and I get extra cheap power outside of my timed window sometimes, and would like to force charge the batteries (which in turn will stop my car discharging them during these windows).
I already have the binary sensor from the octopus intelligent integration, but I don't really want to have to set specific times, just force charge on and off according to the state of the sensor.

[durkimat]

I'll provide one way of doing this then close the discussion...
Two automations can be created one that adds and one that removes another charge window, so switches the inverter into forced charge during that window.
The automation trigger is octopus intelligent slot on, or off for each automation - I also added a binary toggle as another trigger for testing so I could manually flip the charge on or off.
The actions are to set values for the timed charge window. If you have no timed charge window at all you could simply set the minutes start to '1' which then creates a 23hr 59 min charge window. If you already have a fixed window you'll need to set another one that doesn't overlap.
The last action is to press the relevant charge/disadvantage update button to send to the inverter.

I've attached a screenshot of one of the automatons which should give anyone trying this a good idea. It turned out to be very straightforward.

Less straightforward is the way octopus have integrated with Kia to control charging - it's so slow to respond that unfortunately they don't realise the car is plugged in for many minutes. I can't overcome this problem, but maybe this will improve in time. I'm also waiting for the zappi intelligent integration which is in beta and might be (should be) much better...