I only wish that a software problem was my only worry… my new AIO hasn’t worked since December and hounding installer & GivEnergy has been a waste of time. Feels like I just flushed £10k down the drain.
Can call another installer. At the very least another installer will confirm if its just misconfigured or faulty kit. If faulty that is obviously an issue now. But hopefully its something obvious to a decent installer
Agree 100% times are hard and there’s very little that anyone can do, so we need to look for ways to make this work
We’ve literally just discovered givenergy.cloud which is the first time in ages we have been able to view our set up in real time! I wonder if this will fold now too?
Apparently no, it is run by GivSoftware not givenergy ltd. But they do need to find a funding model hence the recent email to all customers about charging for various portal features.
Some assessment of what lies ahead here …
GivEnergy Files Notice to Appoint Administrators as Industry Faces Battery System Risk
and
UK residential battery supplier GivEnergy enters administration proceedings - Energy Storage
However, nothing on the givenergy main website yet.
EV Man on YouTube (ex GE) reports that all GE staff have been made redundant. So that’s the end of it, pretty much.
I wish you well Michael. It’s a shame because the kit is well designed and solid, however giv have always looked chaotic from the outside. To be fair, it’s no easy task running a tech company in an expanding market.
What concerns me is how we maintain our kit if all support / warranty disappears. As an engineer, I don’t trust accountants and administrators. It’s hard working on giv kit when you have to reverse engineer and guess. I’ve spoken to you in the past about the need to publish more tech specs, and to understand more about the internal working of e.g. calibration and diagnostic information. If giv disappears we should have the right to repair and will need schematics and technical information. This should be enshrined in law that when a tech company fails, all tech docs are put online. I’m sure our community could organise this.
To date this was just a looming problem … what happens when our warranty runs out? Now it’s vital if the community must maintain its own kit. And the battery industry has just woken up to the problem of what happens when a large supplier fails.
I’ve heard that equipment is designed in the UK. Is there a chance that technical staff will publish information online once the dust has settled? (from memory and what they have in their possession).
There’s far too much talk and hand waving about ‘calibration’. When you have 16 or 96 cells in series, how is the balancing controlled? Looking at individual cell voltages, it’s clear that there’s sometimes a weak cell. It’s wrong to scrap the whole battery when perhaps we need to simply replace a cell. We don’t know whether this is a real problem, and how many batteries have been replaced because of real or percieved problems. This might have contributed to current financial problems.
If giv disappears, we will need help from the techies who designed a good product.
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Let’s hope that another company will take on Givenergy.
Does anyone know if the HIES scheme might give consumers any protection going forwards?
jonrdg
hmm a bit of wishful thinking in there , no you will not get any diagrams, it hard enough for those of us that worked here to get them, the cells are managed by a very good BMS and yes you could identify and replace the faulty cell.
it’s not an easy task, someone would need to design a process by which this can be done the difficulty is balancing the cells afterwards.
and it’s very risk prone from flashover 100amps at 54v DC can cause quite a burn, this amount of power is unforgiving.
Perhaps in another life I might be persuaded to repair them. one just never knows, I will be sad to leave but it has to happen to ensure that Giv-Software can continue and run the portal
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Home assistant works fine with my Hybrid inverter, might be my only option going forward. I seem to have access to all meaningful features with it and can access it remotely via a VPN on my router quite easily.
I’ll have to do some routing to get the Giv app working remotely via the VPN it seems, but should be possible.
I’m in the hands of Octopus as my installer for warranty issues, they haven’t been very good with some of the post install issues and I had to go direct to Giv to resolve. Hopefully they will have to pay more attention when there is no other option for customers like me.
Fingers crossed though, my system has been trouble free for a couple of years now, I might stop pushing my batteries as hard going forward however if warranty replacements are going to be a problem.
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Since the email last month, I have been trialing Inverter from the Android Play Store. It operates the inverter/battery locally via your home network extremely well, more stable than the Givenergy solution, so no one should have expensive bricks. It is £10 for life, well worth the cost. You lose remote access while out and about but for most this will be a minor annoyance.
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Sadly does not work for me. Can not control the giv EMS device.
Andy,
I assume you’re referring to the “Monitor for Givenergy Inverter App” . Can you confirm that the paid Premium version of the app allows control of the Inverter, such as Charge, Discharge, Pause, and the setting of charge schedules. An AI query told me that it did not do these things.
With my inverter which is the AC 3.0 the premium version allows you to set a charge start and end time and also limit it to a certain % charge. You can set a discharge start and end time and maximum rate, you can turn Eco mode on/off and set the minimum battery reserve default 4%. It will collect stats if you enable that option so you can view graphs and has a schedule and history option which I have never tried so am unsure what they do.
You can restart the inverter and sync the time.
The reading I find most useful is the prediction of the battery charge or discharge state at a future time, I have found this really accurate.
It works quite well and is fast but only works on your local wifi network so no remote control away from home, I think the cost of the premium version is well worth it, I hope this helps.
Thank you, Phil. Very helpful
So GivEnergy has gone into administration.
They make all excuses but I am sure that they would have survived if they had allowed for a proper Customer Support.
When you can’t get Support for these long term items then it is eventually going under.
Now, basically, they want us to pay for this support. Disgusting!
Why would you pay for a local monitor / control app, when this one is free and works exceptionally well?
It is likely this community forum website will disappear at some point. Is there another forum that has a decent amount of GivEnergy customers?