Thank you, this makes sense… I think!
I’ve now disabled ‘Timed Discharge’, and configured the following:
The goal is two-fold; to ensure that all excess solar gets exported to grid and no longer charges the batteries, and I continue to kick the can down the road of avoiding the inevitable obsession and time-sink of configuring and maintaining a Home Assistant instance… Will see what happens tomorrow!
I think the only problem with this configuration is that if you aren’t generating enough solar for your house load it will use the grid, rather than your battery to make up the deficit.
It actually seems to be working fine; battery is currently discharging to fulfil house load as expected. Note that I’ve set a ‘pause charge’ schedule.
Will see what happens overnight, and tomorrow when the sun’s out!
that config is fine, the pause charge only affects the battery charging from solar, it can still discharge as normal to meet house load if it is greater than your solar generation
All working as expected!
…although the battery is still being charged via solar at a low rate (71W) even whilst the pause charging schedule is in effect. Is this normal?
I would expect so, yes. Similar happens when you pause discharge, the battery doesn’t fully pause and there is a slow discharge at a similar rate.
Paul explained that the slow discharge was because with the newer firmware that includes battery pause, the battery power bus is kept active all the time. This gives the ‘fast response’ of that firmware, it’s much faster to respond to changing house load than the previous firmware, but by keeping the power bus active there is a constant electricity trickle.
If you reduce the battery charge rate then I think the trickle might reduce further, but of course you have to manually change it back again (or use something like Home Assistant) when you want to charge.
OK, thanks everyone for the info. I’ve tried, but I can’t get the thing to do a timed discharge even using the methods above. The settings get logged in Remote control, but when the time comes around, nothing happens.
Maybe, as Geoffrey says, it’s because I have an older inverter ? It’s a 2022 hybrid 3.6 one. Dunno if that classes as old ?
I was hoping to be able to work that functionality in case I switch back to Flux at some point so I could do a bit of basic exporting at the higher rate, I really don’t want to go to the trouble (and expense) of setting up home assistant, predbat etc.
However Yesterday I saw a video on Y.T. from Gary Does Solar talking about Axle energy,
Seems like a nice easy way to get a little extra payback without too much hassle involved, it should really help get my payback time for my new battery down.
Has anyone on here had any experience with the Axle energy VPP setup ?
Ta - Dave.
There are a number of GivEnergy users on the Axle VPP service, if you want to join, here’s my referral link Axle Grid Services | Get Paid to Support the Grid - we both earn £25 for the referral.
What’s it like?
It is as Gary describes, Axle can either do full automation of your inverter or what they call events only. I’m on the latter. A few times a month Axle will email you to say that they are going to take control of your inverter the next day, and during that period of time they instruct a forced export for which you get paid £1/kWh plus your normal energy supplier export rate.
You get the money a few days after the event, and if at the end of the month you haven’t earnt £10 then they top you up to £10 minimum.
Only thing to be aware of is that Axle don’t change your inverter settings precisely on the the hour so you may not start exporting precisely on time, and they don’t always put your inverter settings totally back to what they were after the event, especially Eco mode seems to not always get set, so you get an email after the event advising you to check your settings are correct (Eco, timed overnight charge, etc).
Even if the export results in your battery being empty earlier than it would normally be, the £1/kWh will more than cover any grid import you occur.
Axle are currently in a beta trial that is due to end this month. What the terms of the service are after that haven’t been announced. My guess is the £1 rate will drop, but its still profitable to join.
Update -
I’ve finally solved my initial problem and reason for posting this topic in the first place.
I’ve downloaded the “Inverter” android app and paid the extra £10 for control access on it. It’s been running a couple of days now and I can get it to automate a timed discharge to the grid at a time of my choosing and then put itself back into Eco mode afterwards. 
My inverter is one of the early models hence the discharge timings as listed above didn’t work unfortunately but the app allows scheduling the Eco mode on and off at certain times, so you have to schedule it to switch eco off, then do the discharge, then eco back on afterwards. It took a bit of getting my head around the app settings but I seem to have it sussed out now.
I may well end up switching to Flux at some point (Maybe just over the summer months) and knowing that I now have the ability to do a timed discharge will potentially allow me to get a little more payback out of my extra battery.
Also handy to have the app as security in case (if or when) the G.E. server goes down, I should still have local control.
I dragged my retired android phone out of the drawer, got it powered up and will just keep it plugged in at home and running the Inverter app. It needs constant wi-fi connection to talk to the router, so I can’t have the app running on my main phone as it won’t work if I’m away from the house.
As for Axle, I signed up over a week ago and so far they’ve only run one event on my inverter but it’s early days…
Cheers All 
Hi Mr Whippy, I’ve been musing over the same issues as you. Can please confirm whether the app you’re referring to is the ’ Monitor for GivEnergy Inverter’ by Andrew Miller? And is it fairly obvious how to set settings to do what you’re doing?
Hi Richard.
Yes, that’s the one. Andrew Miller…
It’s not super obvious how to set it up at first, but there is a tutorial and once I’d read it through a couple of times and had a dabble it became reasonably easy to see how it works.
If you want to do timed discharge with it then there’s a slightly different method depending on if you have an early model inverter like mine or a later model. There are examples of both ways in the tutorial.
You can download the app for free but it only allows you to monitor the inverter. To access the settings switches you need to pay the £10 but I believe it’s a one off one time only charge. I figured with all the talk of business problems within GE it was worth it just as a backstop in case the portal should ever go dead, and I get the timed discharge option as well.
If you’re going to do the timed discharge thing then the android device needs to stay at home and be connected to your local wifi network that the inverter is on. So it’s not much use only having it on your main phone as it wont work when you’re away from the house. I dragged my old galaxy A40 out of hibernation and installed it on that. It works fine, but if I do start running daily timed discharge patterns then I’ll have to keep it plugged in and on charge all the time.
Hope that helps.
Dave.
Hi Dave,
Thanks for that. I have a Gen1 system so the app looks just the job. I also have a spare cast off android phone so here goes.
I know that GE customer support provision is next to useless (despite so called improvements) - I’ve posted on this forum ways in which I’ve managed to get a response from them. But I’m interested that you wrote of business problems in GE - what might they be?
Richard
Came across this thread - https://www.reddit.com/r/SolarUK/comments/1rf5fz1/are_givenergy_going_bust/
And also there’s a youtuber I follow - EVM - who has recently been made redundant from Givenergy and has had some things to say about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60hGwP5gRy8
So hopefully all will be OK but there might be some clouds on the horizon…
Dave.
Very hard to tell what truth there is in the various rumours. Powerdog exists as a company, there is a Shopify website https://powerdog.co.uk/ but it seems to be mainly template code.
Definitely good to have a backup plan in case things do go south with the givenergy app and portal. In testing both Andrew Miller’s Android app and the BBC Basic inverter app work OK if the givenergy cloud is unavailable. Home Assistant and GivTCP is an option as well but requires more technical setup.
I’ve had about 6 or 7 Axle events since I joined with the more recent events being more profitable as they’ve coincided with solar generation happening.
You mentioned you may try Octopus Flux, whilst it does give good peak export rates, the day export rate is worse so depends on how big your solar generation is compared to your battery size as to which is best. Also with Flux you really need to have a battery big enough to last you from the peak export through to the next solar day. If you have to import overnight then you’ll lose money. When looking at the costs of different options don’t forget to include a ~15% round trip loss of charging/discharging the battery.
Intelligent Octopus Flux gives better rates but you have to hand control of your inverter to Octopus, and given that this control is via the GivEnergy portal, I’m not sure it is a safe option if Givenergy are potentially in trouble. I’d rather stick with remaining in control myself
Yes, I agree with all the above.
£10 is a good value insurance policy I reckon.
I need to sit down, do some maths / spreadsheet work to see if Flux is a preferential option for me in the Summer months or not. I just wanted to be able to see if I could actually do forced discharge to know if Flux would even be on the table as a viable option for me.
As for the future of GE & the portal, I think hope for the best & plan for the worst.
Dave.
I started off my solar export journey with Flux, but have progressively seen the import rates go up and the export rates go down so now it’s (for me) not an option.
The last two summers I have been on Octopus Agile with the 15p (now 12p) flat export rate. I only filled the batteries when its windy and import rates are low, otherwise we ran entirely off self-generated and stored solar. Average summer monthly import rate was only a few pence a kWh as a result.
But we have lots of panels (44) facing East and West and reasonable (13.5kWh) battery capacity. You need to do your own calcs as you say.
Thanks Geoffery
I’ve put my numbers in this spreadsheet - https://timandkatsgreenwalk.co.uk/ and it says Intel Flux is best for me March to September (Summer) and Intel Go the rest of the time (Winter)
That assumes some forced export at peak times when I’m on Go, but TBH the amount I ask it to export doesn’t make a huge amount of difference to the end result as there’s not much difference between the cheap import rate and the now 12p export rate, once charging & conversion losses are factored in.
But at least I now know that I can do the forced export if I want to, which I didn’t have control of previously.
Ta - Dave.