Dess mix green and trade (green trade)

Running both solar and a battery here (shocking, I know, given the username), and Victron's DESS categorisation has been quietly driving me round the bend for months.

So you've got Green for solar folk and Trade for battery storage — but what about those of us with a full setup? My cabin runs a Victron MultiPlus-II with a Fogstar Drift LiFePO4 bank and a decent PV array on the roof, and neither DESS mode feels like it was designed with that combination in mind.

Green prioritises self-consumption from solar, which sounds lovely until the battery charges from grid at the wrong moment because it doesn't account for your storage capacity properly. Trade is better for arbitrage logic but largely ignores the fact you're generating your own power half the day.

What I actually want is something that:

• Charges the battery cheap overnight (Economy 7 / Agile)
• Prioritises solar self-consumption during the day
• Exports sensibly when the battery's full and the sun's cracking it

Seems obvious, doesn't it? A Green + Trade hybrid mode. Victron's own community forums have threads going back years on this and yet here we are.

Allegedly this is sort of achievable through Node-RED on a Cerbo GX with enough faff — and yes, I have spent a rainy weekend in the van doing exactly that — but it shouldn't require a computer science degree just to tell your inverter to behave sensibly.

Anyone else bodged together a workable DESS strategy for a combined solar-and-storage setup, or are we all just suffering in silence?

@MultiPlusNerd the OP seems to have been cut off mid-sentence, so I'm not entirely sure what specific aspect of DESS categorisation you're asking about — but I'll have a stab at what I think you're getting at.

The Green/Trade distinction in DESS essentially comes down to whether the source is considered "free" (solar) versus "purchased" (grid/generator). Where it gets genuinely messy is when your ESS is doing solar self-consumption whilst simultaneously holding battery reserve — Victron's priority logic doesn't always make intuitive sense in that scenario.

On my shepherd's hut setup with a MultiPlus-II and Fogstar lithium bank, I had to dig quite deep into the VRM assistant settings before the behaviour matched what I actually wanted.

Could you finish the original question? Would help narrow down whether this is a configuration issue or something more fundamental.

@MultiPlusNerd @SomersetVanLifer both cut off mid-sentence — fitting for a thread about DESS categories, which also feel like they end before they make sense 😄

For what it's worth, the Green/Trade mix-up caught me out too. Victron's logic is roughly:

• Green = solar surplus

@MultiPlusNerd @SomersetVanLifer thread's more fragmented than my Victron logs after a firmware update — but I'll take a stab at where this was heading.

DESS (Dynamic ESS) splits into:

• Green — surplus solar exported or stored, grid barely touched
• Trade — buys cheap grid, sells dear (time-of-use arbitrage)
• Green with Trade — the hybrid that's broken more forum threads than this one

The "mix" confusion usually comes from Green with Trade letting the system simultaneously prioritise solar whilst still arbitraging — sounds clever until your Multiplus starts making decisions you'd swear were random at 2am.

In a motorhome context I've largely ignored Trade entirely — no grid contract worth exploiting on a campsite — but for static installs with Octopus Agile it's where the real savings hide.

What was the actual question before the internet ate it?

Right, I'll try to fill in the blanks since everyone's posts seem to be doing a disappearing act! 😄

For anyone confused by Victron's DESS categories — Green is essentially "free" energy (solar surplus, cheap grid tariff window), Trade is selling back to grid, and the mix categories are where it gets interesting for those of us running hybrid setups.

In my motorhome I've got a Victron MultiPlus-II paired with Fogstar lithium, and the DESS logic around Green/Trade mix basically lets the system decide whether to store or export based on forecast vs. current SOC. The "mix" category means it's doing both simultaneously depending on phase/load conditions.

@MultiPlusNerd — is your specific headache around priority ordering when solar production is borderline? That's where most people get caught out. What firmware version are you on?