Manual Car charge

[CTSchorsch]

Hi all,

i have a running configuration to charge my car in the predicted slots. But sometimes my wife wants to charge the car manually. How can i stop the battery discharging during car charging? i did not found a switch for discharge freeze or something.

Before predbat i set the minimum SoC to the actual SoC, but is this still possible ?

Thanks
Georg

[gcoan]

Predbat doesn't really have the concept of manual car charging as it seeks to optimise your energy costs by charging the car at the cheapest rates.

One option is to set car_charging_now so predbat detects your car charging, but that does have the disadvantage that predbat will assume it is a low rate slot and could start charging your home battery as well. https://springfall2008.github.io/batpred/apps-yaml/#planned-car-charging

You could set input_number.predbat_set_reserve_min to instruct predbat to change the battery reserve to whatever value you want, mirroring what you used to do. https://springfall2008.github.io/batpred/customisation/#inverter-control-options

Or you could set predbat to manual freeze charge mode by using select.predbat_manual_freeze_charge and setting it to the slot times you want to hold the battery level for https://springfall2008.github.io/batpred/customisation/#manual-control

[CTSchorsch]

Hi gcoan,

ah, i read that the usage of car_charging_now is not so easy with the predbat-led aproach ? this would be a nice workaround

i will check the reserve_min option

Thanks

[gcoan]

Have raised an FR for this feature #3242

[dabeeeenster]

In addition to this - if I set Predbat to Monitor mode, it is still affecting the car charging, which I would not expect.

[LeighBicknell]

I just ran into something similar to this with IOG charging.

Ultimately, I wanted to enable car charging from battery when intelligent bump charging switch is on, so i created an automation to sync the two. What I found however was that the octopus API puts something like this in the intelligent dispatch sensor:

planned_dispatches: 
- start: '2026-01-29T15:03:35+00:00'
  end: '2026-01-29T19:00:00+00:00'
  charge_in_kwh: -0.84953
  source: BOOST

Predbat appears to ignore the source: BOOST in this scenario and assume this is a cheap slot, thereby charging the house battery during the peak rate bump charge, the exact opposite of the desired behavior.