Switching from Trade to Green mode still drains battery to grid

Ran into something similar with my Victron MultiPlus-II setup feeding the garden office last month and it's been bugging me ever since.

Switched the ESS assistant from "Optimised (with BatteryLife)" over to what I'd loosely call the greener profile — essentially telling it to prioritise self-consumption and stop selling to the grid. Figured that would naturally cap the discharge behaviour. It didn't. The MPII was still happily pushing amps back through the meter well past 22:00 when solar had long gone, drawing the Fogstar Drift 48V pack down further than I'd like overnight.

The thing is, ESS doesn't automatically infer battery protection from the mode alone — you have to explicitly set the feed-in limit and the minimum SOC separately. Feels like it should be obvious from the UI but it really isn't.

What I ended up doing:

• Set minimum SOC to 30% in VEConfigure
• Disabled AC feed-in entirely in the CCGX settings
• Double-checked the "prevent feed-in when battery below X%" was actually saving (it wasn't first time round — firmware glitch possibly)

After that it behaved. But I'm genuinely curious whether anyone else has seen the mode-switch alone not honouring implied limitations? Wondering if this is a firmware version issue — I'm on v497 on the MPII.

Also worth checking: if you're running a Pylontech or similar CAN-connected battery, the BMS SOC threshold sometimes conflicts with what the GX device thinks it should do. Could mask what's actually happening.

Anyone else dug into this? Particularly interested if you've seen it on v500+.

@SuffolkCruiser classic ESS trap that one. When you switch modes, the MultiPlus-II doesn't immediately re-evaluate its dispatch logic — it carries forward the previous mode's scheduled charge/discharge windows until VEConfigure or the GX device pushes a fresh config.

Check your DVCC settings in the Cerbo/CCGX. If "Use charge current limiter" is still set from Optimised mode, it'll happily continue bleeding the battery toward the grid minimum SoC threshold even in Green mode.

Also worth verifying your ESS minimum SoC isn't set absurdly low — anything under 20% and BatteryLife's remnant logic can interfere even after you've nominally disabled it.

On my narrowboat setup I had a similar ghost-drain situation after switching modes mid-cycle. A full VRM portal config push (not just the app toggle) sorted it immediately. Don't just use the mode dropdown — push a complete settings write.

@ExSquaddie49 has already half-answered it but the bit nobody mentions is that your minimum SOC setting in the ESS config is almost certainly still set to whatever it was in BatteryLife mode — MultiPlus-II doesn't reset that when you switch assistants, it just quietly keeps draining to that floor and feeding the grid like it owes someone money. Check it in VEConfigure under the ESS assistant tab, not the CCGX/Cerbo — learned that the hard way when my static van's Victron setup was happily exporting at 3am while sitting at 20% SOC.

@ForestDaz finish your sentence mate, we're all hanging here like a soggy solar panel in November.

But yeah — had this exact faff on my narrowboat when I was tinkering with the Quattro setup. The bit that'll get you is the DVCC settings in VictronConnect; if your BMS is still handshaking on the old charge parameters it'll cheerfully dump to grid regardless of what ESS thinks it's doing. Check whether your Venus OS is actually seeing the mode change or just nodding along like it understands.

Fogstar Drift cells did my head in with this for a fortnight before I realised the BMS comms were the culprit, not the MultiPlus config itself.

@ForestDaz mate, you've done it again — left us all dangling like a half-wired Anderson connector. Sort yourself out 😂

To actually finish the thought: your minimum SOC in ESS config is probably still set to whatever BatteryLife was using. When you swap to Optimised mode without adjusting that figure, the system happ

@ForestDaz I'm going to need you to finish that sentence before I can sleep tonight. It's like watching someone start to explain why the fuse blew and then just... wandering off to make a brew.

That said — does anyone know if this behaviour changes depending on whether you've got a scheduled charge window active? I've got a similar MultiPlus-II setup in my shepherd's hut and I'm wondering if the grid-feed issue is partly the DVCC settings overriding the ESS mode rather than the mode switch itself being the problem. Mine did something odd last week that I couldn't fully explain.