My inverter has been idle for a couple of days. Have repeatedly tried to restore without success and Give Energy engineers do not return calls. Any ideas please?
My hybrid gen 1 inverter on firmware D0.450-A0.451 has since 4th November started to go Idle when the battery discharges below 20%, or in my case 3KWH. The system is in ECO mode and the battery reserve is set to 4% with 100% discharge power enabled. Any suggestions as to what is going wrong?
it could be that the BMS has lost track of the SoC value during the summer when you’ve had the battery full most of the time.
I’d suggest either a full discharge to empty and then a full discharge to full, or initiate a calibration via the givenergy portal to enable the BMS to regain an understanding of SoC levels
Confession time . It was me - literally finger trouble. We all know the Battery Reserve (usually 4%?) set in both the app and the portal. However there is another limit on battery discharge called, in the GivEnergy dashboard in Home Assistant, “GivTCP Battery Power Cutoff”. This over-rides the general Battery Reserve. According to AI the Battery Reserve is supposed to be used to reserve power for the Emergency Power Supply, whereas the Battery Power Cutoff is the absolute limit to prevent the battery from damage. I have never found the Battery Power Cutoff control in either the app or the portal.
Anyway, as users of Home Assistant may know, when looking at the GivEnergy dashboard, a touch on any of the sliders instantly changes the value, with no feedback or confirmation check. So, if you scroll down the page on a touch screen and happen to touch the Battery Power Cutoff slider it instantly changes the value to, in my case 19%, and hence the battery never discharges below 19%. Since I corrected it, the problem has disappeared. One lives and learns, but hopefully this experience will be useful to others.
Hi Geoffrey, thank you as ever for your insights, but you will see below that it was all self-inflicted! Do people keep the battery full over the summer? In my case the PV generated during the day is all exported and the battery dumped before the start of the overnight cheap charging period. 15p versus 7p!
Ah yes, the GivTCP self inflicted settings change. I know that well, have made similar accidental changes myself in the past.
I have my GivTCP controls on a custom dashboard, with just a few controls visible and the rest behind a drop-down. It’s also cutdown to just the controls I might ever use to reduce the clutter (and stops accidental clicks). Here it is for my two inverters:
On your question about use of the battery over summer, yes, a lot of people who don’t setup smart import export schedules will leave their battery in Eco mode so (with a decent battery size) in summer, the battery hardly gets exercised and thence the SoC problems I mentioned.
If you regularly charge and discharge as you do then this problem is avoided.