Battery/inverter connection issues

I will summarise the long and sordid tale into a timeline:

8kwh battery installed November 2021.

By March 2022 I was reporting issues with the charge level occasionally dropping to zero when it hit 24%.

Over time, this got worse - i.e. more frequent - until it started occasionally dropping to zero from 40-odd% too by about May/June. This seemed immediately suspicious to me - I mean those figures are in roughly 25% increments of the total capacity, you buy GE batteries in 2.x chunks, which is about 25% of my battery... my pattern-recognition spidey-sense immediately started tingling.

GE repeatedly assure the 'next' firmware update will resolve. Dear reader... it did not. Though it did make it less common, eventually.

27th July 2022, we had a power drop. The inverter came back up, the battery came back up... but the two things did not talk to each other in any way. All the restarts in the world, in all the different orders made no difference.

This led to months of back and forth between me, installer and GE - well, I say back and forth. In fact it was me sending emails into a void, rarely did GE do me the courtesty of a reply - before GE finally agreed to send someone out. Apparently there was some dispute about outstanding invoices and other nonsense that's nothing to do with the customer, but GE were perfectly happy to just ignore me: no proactive updates, no responses to my request for updates.

7th October someone from GE came out and restored function - took about an hour.

I asked weekly for a month after that for a copy of the report. I still haven't had it - it's now almost December - and the silence from GE has been deafening. Not even the courtesy of a 'no you can't have that' - just silence. In the last few weeks I've given up asking. Appalling.

How am I supposed to challenge my installer or invoke warranty without that? Why can't I have it?

Since 7th October the system has been experiencing regular mini-inverter outages where it would go off for a couple of hours then spring back to life.

13th November this flakiness all seemed to stop, hurrah! But I've noticed this week that ever since then the thing is only charging up 6kwh each night not 8. It still thinks it is hitting 100%.

...that means it's missing 25% of it's capacity.

This ties very strongly back to the sudden SOC drops from 24% to zero it was seeing shortly after install. So my spidey sense is now saying 'if I turned out to be right all along and an entire 2.x capacity chunk of this battery is indeed faulty, I am going to flip my lid after being assured there was just a firmware issue'

And then, early hours of last night, 27th November 2022 the battery charged to 6kwh (not 8)... then died. Inverter is fine, but it can't see the battery, the app can't see the battery or connect to the inverter.

What the hell am I supposed to do with this? Which gaping black void should I be reporting it to? Bug reports don't result in a response anymore (though I still raise them), emails don't result in a response anymore (though I still send them), the phone line only reaches anyone during office hours, when obviously I'm at work, and the FAQs on the web site just say "take everything up with your installer", who doesn't get any better response or dialogue out of GE than I do.

So what I really want to do at this point is invoke the warranty: in the first 12 months it's not been at all stable, it is not delivering the capacity it is supposed to and GivEnergy don't response in a manner that would have it sorted out in what I would consider a reasonable time frame (28 days), nor do they respond when i raise it via the channels they provide.

Does anyone know how I do that?

I'll just leave this here too in case anyone else is having this kind of terrible customer / product experience: https://www.bbc.co.uk/send/u23123288?ptrt=https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mg74

you would be wise to read this thread
https://community.givenergy.cloud/d/713-firmware-3007-has-not-fixed-sudden-soc-drop-to-0-problem/1311

positor1

Read it many times, though not had a recent look, so I have just taken a quick skim of the last few weeks there doesn't seem to be anything which covers:

• My battery and inverter deciding to just not talk to each other
• The fact the battery will only charge and then deliver 75%.

This isn't an "SOC display issue" as far as I'm concerned, although yes I have that issue as well.

I can see that the device does not bring in more than 6KWH nor does it discharge more than that. Until today, when it's charged up to "full" (again, only pulled in 6kwh from supposedly empty) then disappeared entirely from the system.

The thread also of course doesn't answer the question of lack of updates from GE in response to my enquiries, nor the three-month gap for me to get a visit to look at why my system was offline - that's a 25% downtime from the first year alone, please note.

In the 7 weeks since it has been restored:

• first 5 weeks: strange inverter-offline periods. SOC and operation seems ok, just massive gaps in the data every day. No response from GE after reporting this.
• last 2 weeks: only charging to 75% of it's capacity at the start of year 2 on a 10 year warranty! That's a 25% capacity outage over around 4% of the year, or 1% downtime for the full year 2 already and that year is only 27 days old. Mind you I only noticed this last night and its the weekend so I'm not bitter no-one has responded yet.
• Last 6 hours: fully dead again. Came here to post - and sent another email, of course.
• entire time: no copy of the engineer's report after his visit to my property, nor a response confirming whether I am even allowed to see it. Just silence.

I kinda feel like I've been super patient with GE over this.

dunklezhan Inverter is fine, but it can't see the battery

You seem to have two different but associated issues, for which you have my sympathy. The first issue is "loss" of capacity; the second being loss of communications between battery and inverter, for the second time.

My advice with the second problem would be to contact your installer tomorrow and ask them to progress a resolution with Givenergy as it unfortunately feels like another hardware problem, given your description. If possible, you could also try a web-chat with Givenergy themselves tomorrow as they could see your inverter real-time and agree that there is a hard fault, or resolve it somehow remotely. There have been good reports about the responsiveness of the web chat route compared with other support routes. If you are successful with both routes, happy days, if not then, hopefully one will work.

WRT to the first issue; apparent loss of capacity, what does your battery nameplate say? Elsewhere on this forum, @hoggy is gathering together information about battery types and his unofficial Givenergy wiki may provide some examples of nameplates which you can compare yours to. What I'm alluding to is that you need to be sure whether your Batt8.2 is a 100% Depth of Discharge or 80% DoD (Hoggy has one of these). If it was 100% DoD, it would have taken about 10kWh to fully charge during the calibration cycle, providing an operational 8.2kWh whereas an 80% DoD would take 8.2kWh to charge with an operational 6kWh. You probably have a 100% DoD, in which case, you have a valid complaint about loss of capacity, but if it's an 80% DoD, then it's behaving as designed; I guess you just need to be certain which.

Tim Thanks, that's helpful - hadn't even seen the web chat option, I'll give that a go.

Regards the battery version I'll check & post in the thread to add to the knowledge bank. I know its an 8.x Li+ not the LiFePO4 I was initially expecting, though supposedly it's 100% usable. I have left it set to 4% reserve since that's how it came, although in theory I could set it to zero I just always felt like that was asking for trouble in terms of lifespan regardless of the 10 year warranty I paid for. The only settings I really have ever changed are the max charge level, depending on the season, and scheduling that charge for the octopus go period.

The reason I noticed a problem at all was that since install - i.e. for the last year + some weeks - full charge has been the former scenario - taking/delivering around 8. On 13th nov it dropped to cycles of 6, where it's stayed.

Update on current outage - back online about half an hour after I posted here. Not sure if someone's working sunday and did something, or what. Still very Ungood.

EDIT everything I said was wrong, so I've snipped it - I was reading the page wrong, like a fool!

The inverter's firmware has an update pending. The battery is still version 3008.

It's saying that my inverter firmware version is D0.534-A0.534, with a last update time of 2022-06-27 22:32:45 (a month before the main outage in summer).

I'm still in 2 minds as to whether I should risk upsetting the system further though, but I was wrong to say it had reverted to an "earlier" firmware version cos I've no idea what the inverter firmware version was - I just knew I'd received 3008.

Tim
to answer your specific question regards the name plate (which I'll go post over in the thread you signposted too):
Li+,
Giv-Bat8.2,
100%DoD,
nominal voltage 51.2,
voltage range 46.4-57.6,
rated capacity 160Ah,
usable @25C 160Ah.

dunklezhan yes that’s the same as our Batt8.2s. They’re actually 10kWh 80% DoD, marketed as 8.2kWh 100%DoD. Either way you would consume 10kWh on a calibration but have 8.2kWh operational range.

dunklezhan The inverter looks to be an AC-Coupled with that firmware version. AFAIK, the later update only fixes the issue where altering the 4% reserve limit doesn't work. If that's not an issue for you, then you don't need to update it. 3008 is the battery firmware and not the beta firmware being tested to fix the SoC drop issues.

It seems like once your inverter and battery are speaking again, that a battery calibration would help to either re-establish your upper and lower limits and your full capacity, or prove that there is a hardware problem. Again, a phone call/web chat to Givenergy would initiate this, or your installer also has access rights to do it.

dunklezhan So it's a true 100% DOD one. The stuff Tim is referring to is here regarding batteries.
Take it yours says 2P16S on the nameplate so it'll have 32 cells inside and should give you near as matters 8.2kWh.

I suspect given the issues you're having you either have a long lingering calibration issue or something a bit more terminal going on with your cells. (You could load up GivTCP and see what the cells are up to but given it's only monitoring 16 of the 32 cells then the problem may be getting masked)

Tim I can't find a web chat option anywhere Tim, can you point me at a page to initiate it? It's really hard for me to get time for a phone call in work hours.

dunklezhan Neither can I now! I'll check again tomorrow in office hours. It used to pop up from the "contact us" page but the web site has been revamped.

Tim Yep, during office hours the Contact us page has a web chat pop-up at the bottom right.