Dynamic ESS replaced by Home Assistent

Been running Victron kit at the cabin for a couple of years now and I had a similar frustration with Dynamic ESS — it's supposed to be clever but in practice I found it doing baffling things with grid import timing. My setup pulls from solar during peak Agile tariff windows rather than protecting the battery, which is the opposite of what you'd want.

I've been seriously considering moving the logic across to Home Assistant with the Victron integration. The appeal is obvious — you get full visibility over what the DESS algorithm is actually deciding, and you can write your own automations based on Octopus Agile pricing via the energy dashboard or one of the dedicated add-ons like Octopus Energy integration.

The trade-off I'm wrestling with is reliability. The Victron ecosystem (Cerbo GX, Venus OS) is rock solid in my experience — HA introduces another point of failure, especially if you're running it on a Pi that might lock up. For a remote cabin that's a genuine concern.

Has anyone here actually made the switch from Dynamic ESS to HA-controlled charge/discharge scheduling with their Victron kit? Specifically interested in:

• How you're sending setpoints back to the Cerbo (MQTT or Modbus TCP?)
• Whether you kept Venus OS Large with Node-RED as a fallback
• How it handles the Agile half-hourly price feed during poor connectivity

Would also be curious whether anyone's tried keeping Dynamic ESS running alongside HA and just overriding specific slots — or whether that's a recipe for the two fighting each other constantly.

@QMC_Camper Dynamic ESS is basically that mate who insists he's great at parallel parking but takes 47 attempts — the algorithm's "clever" until your Fogstar battery's getting hammered at 3am because spot prices dipped 0.2p. 🔋

Switched mine over to HA with the Victron integration and honestly the control is night and day — you're actually telling the system what to do rather than hoping the cloud's having a good day. Set my EV charging to only kick in when grid carbon intensity drops below a threshold too, which Dynamic ESS wouldn't touch with a barge pole.

The Victron MQTT broker plays lovely with HA once you get it set up — just don't ask me how long that took.

@QMC_Camper I made the jump to Home Assistant controlling my Multiplus II about eight months ago and honestly it's transformed how the whole system behaves. Using the Victron integration via MQTT you get full read/write access to virtually every ESS parameter — charge current limits, grid setpoint, the lot.

The key advantage over Dynamic ESS is that you define the logic. I've got automations that factor in Octopus Agile pricing, my battery SOC curve, and even weather forecast data to pre-emptively charge before a cloudy run.

Fogstar Drift cells here, so predictable behaviour from the BMS side makes the HA automations far more reliable.

The learning curve is real but the Victron community docs on the dbus-mqtt-py integration are solid. Worth every hour spent on it.

@SimonKelly eight months is a decent amount of time to have it bedded in — what does your automation logic actually look like for deciding when to charge from grid vs discharge? I'm trying to work out whether it's genuinely worth the setup effort or if I'd just be recreating the same logic Victron already has but with more complexity on my end.

My situation is slightly different — running a van conversion setup that also doubles as emergency backup for the house, so I've got a Multiplus 12/3000 and a Fogstar Drift 200Ah. Grid tariff timing matters a lot to me so I'd want HA to be making decisions based on Octopus Agile pricing ideally. Is that the kind of thing you've managed to set up, or is it more manual rules-based?

@SimonKelly @VanKev the secret sauce is combining Solcast API for solar forecast with Octopus Agile pricing in a single Node-RED flow — charge when price drops below X p/kWh and tomorrow looks cloudy, otherwise let the Fogstar batteries ride it out. Victron's MQTT integration makes it dead easy to push SOC targets to the ESS assistant without touching VRM. My static's been doing this for six months and the only "baffling" decisions now are ones I programmed, so at least I've got someone competent to blame.