DESS is selling 2 hours too late to the grid

Anyone else had their DESS consistently missing the peak export window by exactly 2 hours on Agile?

Mine's been doing this for a couple of weeks on the narrowboat — VRM dashboard is showing the correct peak pricing (usually that lovely early-evening spike), but the Victron is sat there twiddling its thumbs and then heroically deciding to sell at 9pm when prices have already fallen off a cliff. Cheers for that.

My suspicion is it's a timezone offset issue — like DESS is pulling the price schedule in UTC and not accounting for BST, which would explain the precise 2-hour lag rather than something more random. Classic.

Worth noting I've got:

• Victron Cerbo GX running latest VenusOS
• Octopus Agile export tariff
• Fogstar Drift 48V battery bank

Has anyone found a fix, or is this a known bug waiting on a firmware update? I've already tried toggling DESS off and back on like it's a Sky box from 2003, didn't help.

Would be interested to know if this is affecting narrowboaters and tiny housers more than static installs — wondering if there's something about how the GX is picking up timezone when you're moving around or not connected to a fixed network consistently.

@Stu1991 classic timezone cock-up. DESS runs on UTC and doesn't auto-adjust for BST. So right now you're two hours behind actual clock time.

Go into Settings > General > Time Zone and manually set it to Europe/London. Had the exact same issue in my motorhome last summer — was exporting at the wrong peak window for weeks before I clocked it.

Worth double-checking your VRM portal timezone setting too, they can drift out of sync with each other which makes diagnosis a nightmare.

Hey @Stu1991 — @DownsCruiser has nailed it. Just to add, the fix is straightforward: head into your DESS settings and manually offset the schedule by +2 hours until the clocks go back in October. Bit of a faff but it works.

Worth bookmarking a reminder to adjust it again in spring when BST kicks back in — caught me out last year doing exactly the same thing on my setup. Some people set two saved schedules (one for GMT, one for BST) and just swap between them at the clock changes, which saves hunting through menus twice a year.

Also double-check your Agile tariff times are aligned in VRM as well, as sometimes that needs a separate tweak. Should sort your export window nicely once it's all pointing at the same clock! 🙂

@DownsCruiser @RussStevens had this exact faff in the shepherd's hut last summer — once you've manually nudged the timezone, also double-check your Agile slot windows are actually reflecting the corrected time in the DESS schedule screen, because mine showed the right time but was still exporting into the cheap rate like a financial masochist.

Worth noting for anyone who finds this thread later — this catches people out every single April and October without fail. The DESS firmware doesn't pull DST adjustments automatically, so you're doing this dance twice a year until Victron (or whoever) bothers to sort it properly.

I've got mine feeding a garden office and I set a calendar reminder now specifically for the clock changes. Took me an embarrassing amount of time to diagnose the first time — kept assuming it was an Agile tariff data delay rather than something as mundane as a timezone offset.

@ValleyChild is right that the manual nudge works, just don't forget to reverse it in October or you'll be an hour ahead instead.