Has a complete Give Energy Gen5.3 inverter and 9.5kw battery installed in April for 3 months it was excellent, when 100% charged its would still have 60% left in the morning even with dish washer on overnight but now its zero charge in the morning , I was taking 5-6 hours to fully charge but now it goes from zero to 100% in 2 hours … I dont believ its using all the battery capacity and my electric import bill has gone up and my export paymenst have gone down a lot Im with Octopus ,
GE have recalibrated my system twice and say its fine but I dont believe them as my old System which was solar edge and Pylon batteries in old house was much better performing and it was only 3.6 KV battery
Also the installation company is not answering calls they are in business annd are a well known organisation , Its as if GE dont care …
Any idea what is wrong with my new system , Im not happy
I know it seems crazy… but do you have a smart meter display or something that monitors the Mains usage ? ( I have a CT clamp that monitors my mains for both import/export - to compare figures )
I use around 800w per hour just on “Tick over” - so my 2x 9.5KW batteries can soon get drained if the sun goes down at 6 or 7 PM
But I do also agree that alarm bells would be ringing if it is saying fully charged in 2 hours as it would take around 3 hours at the full 3.6KW it is capable of.
I wonder if there are any loose connections in the battery ? and that could explain the BCM getting confused.
My setup was also installed in May with a 5KW inverter and 2 x 9.5KW batteries and apart from a few firmware issues ( now all resolved ) my has been working without any issues.
Which then does lead into the final question… are you on the lastest Firmware for the inverter and Batteries ?
It’s a known problem that the inverter has trouble accurately tracking the true battery state-of-charge. There’s a video recommending fully cycling the battery from time to time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7lAUEvJpwU
I’m guessing that, over the summer, the battery rarely got below 50% or so ?
If you set it to charge, how long do you leave it charging once it reports 100% ? If you leave it several hours charging even after it reports 100%, it may rebalance the cells and find space for more. SImilarly, when it gets down to empty, allowing it to sit idle may rebalance. Once it gets back in sync, giving it a cycle from time to time as recommended may prevent it getting into this state.
Its charging all the time ,I have it set so that if it hits 100% the excess from the solar panels goes for export, yesterday at 11pm it was 74% , with only 107w draw for fridges etc very low but at 7:30 am it was down to 4 % but it was not set to export unless panels were charging , so clearly there is a massive loss or the battery charge is not true, its been doing this for last 6 weeks ,
The Customer service at Give Energy have done software updates and resets etc and tell me that they see a problem with my system but they wont explain what it is or , propose a solution , Im not happy as its only 6 months old , Looks to me that the battery has a fault but I dont know for sure . But £10,00 system should be more reliable , I can also see that my Octopus export and import have changed over last 6 weeks , so im importing more and exporting less and the battery is often empty at 4% , it charges up too 100% in 2 hours even when there is little sun which cant be correct
I wish I had not bought a Give energy system , my old house Solar edge and Pylon system never had these problems
Give Energy are now arranging sending a field engineer , as my system is actually now consuming more power from the grid than I am exporting or using so im losing money , yesterday The battery imported 11kw from the grid but I only used 3.1kw all day and night and the solar panels generated 6.7kw and exported 4.6kw of that , last night battery went from 94% at midnight to 4% by 3am with house draw of only 127w , when I went to the loo and stayed at 4% until 7am then from 7am to 9:15am it went up to 100% all from the grid ??? crazy …
they are very busy with lots of problems so I dont know how long i will have to wait for engineer could be 3 weeks ???
OK Engineer came plugged in his laptop , he said the system had lost Battery calibration a full battery should be 186,000 mine was saying 33,000 and full , He is not sure how it Lost calibration but its being re calibrated now and he will monitor it remotely for next few days
im hoping this solves the issue …
Is there a desktop app that shows the battery true calibration so i can monitor it as the standard Android Phone app does not seem to be able to do that ,???
Well - if he is getting info about the SOC then they must have a different API in place for their laptops to see more information, I cannot find anything in the API they publish ( GivEnergy API Documentation (v1.26.0) )
I also love how they have figures like 186,000 vs 33,000 etc… does that mean as I have 2 9.5kw mine should be 372,000 ? - ( means nothing )
My battey system is now back working perfectly battery is reaching proper capacity , The 186000 KW cannot be seen on the consumer app , only on the engineers laptop software , which is a shame .But now when my battery say 100% full it is …
But i knew that my battery was out of calibration somehow despite 2 remote calibrations by GE customer service , but an on site engineer has restored it back to 100% operation .