I’ve installed the new app and to be honest, I find it a big step backwards especially on a small screen iPhone. Why:-
does it always report ‘finding inverters’ when moving from a view back to the dashboard?.
Why is the Battery Schedule always there on the dashboard? At the moment, I don’t see what this offers over the schedule that is set in my EMS. how often are we expected to [cough][cough] fiddle with the schedule? Can’t it be a secondary panel?
TBH, I’d like the old dashboard back and its functionality. Having to go to a list to select ‘Battery View’ is IMHO, a backwards step.
If someone who has worked on the new App could explain the above then more people might consider the premium service.
Yeah it feels a bit rushed/not thought through. I believe there’s 3 guys there so a small team to do everything. They’re going to need ~2500 subscribers just to cover the wage bill…
Let’s hope they get it back to something like it was, as you say, the schedule bit doesn’t need to be visible all the time…
Agree with both of those. It’s now painfully slow to just get a snapshot of how your system is doing at the moment (over 30 seconds before the diagram appears - a lot of which is downloading the schedule) and on my phone the schedule takes up so much of the screen I can barely read the information I want to see (state of charge and output and consumption)
I agree about the schedule. I set the charge/discharge values when the EMS was installed and probably won’t change them apart from the battery charge % until I move onto a new tariff.
Confused? Yeah.
now, if it was all to do with battery conditioning and synchronisation (I have 4 batteries and 2 inverters with an EMS sitting on top) then I’d be more interested but as those are periodic events, they are IMHO better handled on a panel of its own.
Sigh,
Now the app has lost the inverters it had earlier. I never had this with the old app. All I have done is move upstairs to my home office which is right above the kitchen where the inverters are located on the outside wall. The connect via cloud is off.
The old app was very stable compared to this one.
I’m on Android. Got the app announcement, waited to see what would happen, and it appears to have updated itself automatically.
Following the update, it can’t find the inverter.
I uninstalled the app and re-installed it but it is still unable to find the inverter. Does anyone have any ideas what to do next?
So now we’re paying a subscription for a joke of an app ? What is going on ? Why is this battery schedule plastered over one third of my screen ? Why can’t I access functions that were available before ? It’s gone from being relatively intuitive to almost pointless ? If this doesn’t improve quickly , I won’t be continuing with this subscription. Come on guys , this is amateur stuff …
So I uninstalled and reinstalled the Givenergy app on 2 android phones and an ipad.
This is my experience.
The app only works on one of the android phones.
When opening the app on the one android phone, it goes through a lengthy process of trying to find the inverter - every single time. Fortunately it does.
On all the other devices it does not. There is currently no way to input the inverter address via Settings > Connections etc… it just takes you to an option to download installer apps.
There is an option to Connect via cloud service - but you need a Premium account to do so.
Regarding the one phone currently actually displaying the app - the phone is a large screen Samsung Ultra 25 - but the dashboard is only across half of the page - making it tiny in terms of seeing details.
In fact for anyone visually impaired it must be even worse if not completely unusuable.
Meanwhile, the lower half of the page is taken up with stuff about the battery - Battery Schedule and Smart Scheduler.
I presume this is for changing how you use the battery?
I’m fortunate enough to be on a FIT scheme so already get paid for export thus don’t wanna upset any of that.
I did send feedback to Givenergy - and it seems they are going to do an update to the app - although when is anyone’s guess.
I’m not a techie by any means so had decided I would be signing up to Premium - however - until they fix it so my devices can connect and so I can actually see the dashboard without a magnifying glass - I’m not bothering.
Android user.
Decided we would sign up for Premium using latest app 4.0.5. on phone.Process went smoothly and we are members of the new club.
As others here and across other forums have been posting the new app is not good and has deadly local features that could trip up the unwary.
On my tablet I have version 4.0.4 still installed and YES it is still working just fine as it always has. NO change. Schedules and the like, inverter ip,tariff, home and away, etc all AOK.
So decided to uninstall 4.0.5 from phone and using APKpure downloaded and installed 4.0.4. logged in and all good to go.
Not much use for iPhone users or those not wishing to pay for premium but others might want to consider it.
Until support get round to producing a better ap, I will stick with the old version and hope they don’t break it anytime soon.
Android user, Nothing 3a phone, got Premium free with my existing Axle subscription.
The app is very s-l-o-w, and I agree with the points above, it sticks on the “getting things ready” screen for a long time, then takes another age to find the inverter, which sometimes needs 2 attempts.
Could do without the “battery scheduler” taking up a chunk of the screen also. What’s that all about anyway ?
Pretty dismal TBH.
I have the “Inverter” app on my old android smartphone and that works great, but only within range of my home wi-fi. If I’m at home, then that’s the app I’m using until GE software get their app fixed.
I agree 100% with steved. I would add that the finding inverters is done far more often than is necessary, but on my hard wired network connection, it also takes far longer than is necessary.
I’m sure most people would agree, so I expect it will be improved quite soon.
The app should be able to use the previous config because things rarely change once setup. IF they do then having an option to search for inverters would solve that.
I’ve just changed my EMS settings because I’m moving to a new Supplier Tariff and the cheap rate period is different from the old one. Other that, I don’t see the need for this ‘Smart Charging’ feature. Perhaps someone could explain the reasoning behind it to us.
Hi. I agree with those who have already messaged. Why is this App now worse, rather than better? Where is the “local” connection which used to update every 10 seconds and why can I not see the battery percentage on the Home Dashboard? Let’s hope that some of these things get sorted out in the next few days. Please!!!
Android User, Samsung Phone + Tablet, and I used cloud version on Windows laptop.
Was already subscribed to Axle before the app was downloaded.
On the day of the change - got the basic free app. Cloud access just gave me the menu about options to go premium.
I managed to find the inverter and battery on the non premium app - yes it is slow but it works, and the settings are nowhere near as user friendly as the old app.
Now I have not tired the battery settings, but can see why each half hour slot can be pre-programmed.
Many times on the old app, I would set an export in the morning, and the app sometimes switched back to Eco but sometimes did not at end of export - so I can see advantages in the new setup for battery.
In the old app every time axle had an event worked flawlessly for me - battery back to Eco mode at end of event.
So be interesting to see what happens with next axle event.
I followed the instructions to get the premium version yesterday as an axle subscriber.
On my PC - the cloud page has gone back to the way it was before (using google chrome)
On my phone - app appears to have gone to premium - settings much easier. Same on tablet although the graphic is a bit disjointed.
I will at some point try the 30 minute battery settinsgs.
I have the latest GivEnergy app on my mobile phone.
I have been using the app for managing the use of the Octopus Go Tariff. The previous app use to have a Timed Charge which when enabled was enabled forever and when the charge actually started then the ECO Mode was automatically disabled during the period. So I set the Timed Charge for the battery to be the 5 hours when the tariff was low, i.e. 00:30am to 5:30am. This meant that I could also charge my car over the same period.
Now the Timed Charge doesn’t last for very long, i.e. about 30 minutes, and the ECO Mode is not disabled. So if the car is charged then it also uses energy from the battery and causes the battery to discharge.
So I have had to replace using the app by writing software using the API, this is written in Python and runs on a Raspberry Pi. I have set the Timed Charge to be restarted every 30 minutes. I also realised that I had to disable the ECO Mode and I found out that didn’t last very long either so I have also set this to be disabled every 30 minutes.
I have found that this does work but not as well as it used to. As the ECO Mode can only be disabled when it is enabled there are short periods during the 5 hours when the battery is discharged but fortunately not by very much, e.g. 100% to 95%.
There are no details on the app about how all this works so I have had to estimate it by running tests.
I used the software I had written to monitor how long the Timed Charge and ECO Mode disable stayed valid so I could control it better. At the beginning of the week this was 1 hour, now it is 30 minutes. Why the change and why are GivEnergy Software not telling us? Given the complexity of the app now, there should be a manual to tell us how it works and why the changes have been made so we can use it and program it better. Anyone able to describe this at all?
I am now on the latest version of the App, last updated on 2nd Jul. It is improving quite alot and so much better that before. I found out that I could disable the Smart Scheduler and it would work as expected. For example, I can now set up Timed Charge and it remains there until I change it.