Hello. I’ve had a scan through the various threads but I’m not certain what I’m doing wrong. Our GE battery was installed at the weekend as part of a brand new heat pump & solar system. We are on Octopus Cosy so looking to charge during the cheap time slots and use battery during the evening peak.
I’ve followed the advice posted here to set-up a charging schedule for the 1-4pm cheap Octopus afternoon slot. However 1pm came and went but the battery didn’t start charging. I had to force a charge using the app. Any idea what I’m doing wrong? I have ‘Eco’ enabled - is that the culprit?
In addition I seem only able to set-up one charging slot with no obvious way of adding a second or third. I can add 2x discharging schedules.
Many find setting a charge slot easiest to setup on the app.
Top right cogwheel
Select Timed Charge and then Enable Timed Charge Slots
Now select the charge slot you want and then Save changes.
You may be able to set up the 3 charge slots that you want here.
When the charge is complete, the mode should go back to Eco.
While the charge is being carried out, you are not in Eco mode.
Once you have set up a charge slot (1pm-4pm here), this should be repeated each day.
You can also do this on the web portal:
My Inverter
Settings
Timed charge
You should be able to set up the 3 charge slots that you want for Cosy.
Once set up and working, that should be it!
You can do far more on the portal (See below)
Get back to tell us how you get on and certainly if you need more help.
On the portal on the far right, there is another cogwheel for ‘remote control’. This contains many more settings but be careful at this stage in case you break something!
I have managed to setup 1x charging schedule in the web portal but cannot setup more than one.
I found that when I disabled Eco the charging schedule did kick in however the system also started exporting excess to the grid which I want to avoid. Can I re-enable Eco and maintain the schedule?
You should normally set Eco on all the time, and can then layer charging slots on top of that.
Really your installer should have shown you how to use the app and the portal and ensured you were fully happy with it before he left!
But anyway, to show the setting button:
hamburger icon top left
settings
preferences
turn ‘show system modes button on’
Then you can set your schedules etc.
What inverter do you have, you should have more than 1 charge schedule, its only the very old Gen 1/2 hybrid and AC coupled inverters that have only 1 charge slot.
If the inverter isn’t charging at the right time, check in the portal that your time zone is set correctly to GMT, and do a ‘sync time’ to the inverter
Hello, thanks again for the advice. Greatly appreciated. See attached a photo of the setup. It would appear that I do indeed have an older gen inverter which is rather disappointing. It was only installed last week. Are the advantages of the gen 3 worth me kicking off? The installer has to come back anyway to fit a MyEdi widget to divert solar to hot water.
I’ll soon be switching to Octopus Intelligent Go which only has one cheap energy slot so I can live without 3 charging slots as things stand.
I’ve re-enabled Eco and setup the charge/discharge schedules and will see if they kick-in as expected this afternoon.
Thanks, it looks like you have got an AC3 inverter and separate8.2 or 9.5 battery. The AC3 is basically an end of life product, surprised your installer didn’t put in an all in one which is the replacement and has been out for a couple of years.
And as you have found the AC3 only has 1 charging slot. There is the option to setup more via the givenergy portal - smart charging beta I think its called
Do you have solar? If you do, you must have another PV inverter but there isn’t one in the photo (which is very useful).
The AC3.0 inverter that you have just controls the battery which I presume is 9.5 kWh?
You can tell from the battery capacity on the label.
From what I can see, the intention is to charge your battery using cheap grid electricity and this set up will do that. This also matched your screenshot of the GE app (although I don’t know why there is 3W shown from panels which don’t exist?
The AC3.0 is the stock inverter used by GE for this type of installation.
Gen 3 inverters are ‘hybrid’ inverters used to control solar production and battery.
Questions
Did you ever get the cogwheel to show in the app?
Please send a screenshot to show your Timed charge in the web portal.
This is mine but I would need to ‘enable’ Slot 1
You mention IOG with one charging slot so that will be fine.
With Cosy and an AC3.0 inverter, unfortunately you can only set up 1 charge slot so you will have to set this 3 times a day (including one set up after midnight!) Hardly ideal.
You mention that your installer is coming back to set up an Eddi for diverting solar. This would mean that you do have solar! Is this right? Do you have another PV inverter and if so, what model?
With a heat pump, my advice would be to use the heat pump for heating water. The Eddi converts solar energy into electrical energy 1:1 whereas a heat pump is very efficient and you are like to get about 4 kWh of heat energy from every 1 kWh of electrical energy (the COP).
You don’t need an Eddi!
Finally, did your installer mention the GE All In One (AIO) as an alternative to a separate inverter and battery?
Once we have a complete picture, we should be able to help further.
‘We’ don’t work for GE. We are just folk who try to help other folk!
There is also another ‘Main community forum’ which has a large pool of eager helpers:
Hi thanks again for the very detailed reply. What a fantastic group you are.
To answer the questions:
Solar. Yes I have a newly-installed PV array on the roof (pleasingly generating 1kwh in the sunshine atm). Here’s a photo of the inverter for that system.
Cog wheel: figured this out thanks to the advice here
Timed Charge screen shot attached. What I have found is that the system seems to forget the settings. I set up the schedules twice, both in the app and on the portal. Somehow these are not persistent. Just checked again and all the sliders are off in the app again. I’ll keep trying.
IOG = will switch as soon as I have my new EV reg number
Cosy: understood
Interesting about the Eddi. As I understand it, the Eddi will only trickle heat the hot water from solar once the battery is full, so kind of ‘free’ hot water. Maybe I need a bigger battery :-)
No the installer didn’t mention any options for the GE inverter. I guess what I have will need to do the job.
Meanwhile, the system keeps switching off Eco and the timed charge/discharge schedules off, no matter where I set them. I have enabled the Octopus API integration. Could this be interfering?
Now, what is the ‘Octopus API integration’ that you have set up??
This might the cause of all your problems!!!
There is an integration for Octopus intelligent Flux where Octopus takes over your inverter!
But on the GE dashboard, there is an option for showing your smart data. You supply info for the tariff details to display such as MPAN numbers, etc. You may have supplied this but it wont affect your energy slots.
Delete this API integration from the dashboard may sort out the problem. First lets see what is actually is. Can you screenshot it, provided that you are not displaying your actual API number etc!
But you may be on to something and let’s hope you are nearly there!
Another thought. Givenergy run Giveback where GE takes over you inverter around DFS saving sessions. We have had people who have found that inverter settings mysterious appear or disappear.
If you have signed up to giveback, I would recommend cancelling and using Octopus for any DFS sessions.
It’s this accented from the £ sign in the sidebar:
Here’s a couple of screen shots
Firstly the current state of play. Annoyingly the battery is discharging to the house and also some to the grid. I don’t get paid for grid export because I have a FIT tariff. Any idea how to force it to stop sending energy back??
Meanwhile I noticed earlier that the battery was discharging to the grid so I pressed pause to stop export and charging. For some reason it’s started again. In addition I also notice that the max discharge rate has set itself to 550w whereas before I had it set to maximum. I did not change this setting!!! Alongside the schedules and Eco settings switching themselves off and it feels like the system has a mind of its own!!!
you will always get a little bit imported or exported from the grid because it takes the inverter a finite amount of time (on the AC3 its up to 30 seconds I think) to respond to changing demand. You turn the kettle on, takes the inverter a little while to start discharging to meet the load, when the kettle boils the reverse happens and you get a bit of export as a result.
Couple of things on your FIT, you can get paid for export but you have to lose the deemed export (50% of generation) payments. Depends how much this is worth to you, I gave up mine, lost £100 a year in deemed export but gained £1100 in measured exports.
And (you may not know this), but if you have a smart meter installed (which you must have if you are on Cosy) then you are supposed to give up deemed exports and move to measured export payments. Its in the FIT terms and conditions (I personally only found this out when I was giving up the deemed export payments).
As for why your inverter is changing settings, it looks like there is some automation going on still. Look in the remote control section, bottom of the screen, it’ll show the log of what’s changed on the inverter, when and by whom
