Loss of capacity in new 5.2kWh battery

When installed, the energy used to charge the battery from 4% to 100% was 4.8kWh as reported by the portal. As in, when I got up in the morning when it had charged from the grid overnight, the Charge Today number on the portal was 4.8kWh. Occasionally 4.7 or 4.9.

Two weeks in and the battery only discharged down to 9%. That’s funny, I thought, and carried on with my day. Next day, same thing. I was poking around on the inverter tab and saw a link inviting me to update the firmware. So I pressed it, battery went to version 3005 and proceeded to recalibrate.

It was still at 7% when it got to the cheap charge window that night, but the following day it discharged down to 4%. Happy days.

Except…..

Ever since the firmware upgrade, the Charge Today amount for the overnight charge has been going down. 4.7….. 4.5….. 4.3. This is excluding days when it had not fully discharged.

I seem to be progressively losing battery capacity and the system has been in less than a month.

Any ideas?

Also, how long do Give normally take to respond to emails to support@? I’ve emailed them and no response, not even an automated acknowledgment.

BarbaraG I’ve always found the chat function on the givenergy website to be very responsive. In office hours (though it isn’t an option out of hours)

anglefire

Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll give it another 24 hours and then follow up that way if they haven’t got back to me.

Has anyone else seen this issue?

Er, guessing you don't have any PV?

Sorry to ask what seems like a daft question but as it gets lighter for longer obviously any PV will run the household for longer periods resulting in less battery charge required. I only charged 5.3kwh today and a good kWh of that has been from PV.

yandards

Yes, I do have PV. I’m excluding that from the above figures, just talking about the amount charged from grid when the battery had “run out” the previous evening.

So on the current day, that’s the Charged Today figure from the dashboard before solar gets going in the morning. And for previous days, the Energy Graph breaks the amount of battery charge down into charged from grid or charged from PV.

By the way, the house consumption varies a lot, with temperature being a big component of that. We have two loft-mounted PIV units which preheat the air when the loft temperature is below 10 degrees. On a mild day, we typically consume 7-9 kWh, and I thought the 5.2kWh battery would pretty much do the job. I didn’t know about the PIV units’ cold weather consumption until after I’d specified the system (only moved in the summer.) On a really cold day, our consumption can double.

So, depending on temperature and the amount of generation, the battery can run out at any point from lunchtime to early evening to late evening, or last till the next cheap period. Hopefully that will become a more common experience as time goes on!

I had an issue with my 8.2 battery after a firmware upgrade. It was far more pronounced than yours to be fair, with only about a quarter of the battery capacity in use. I e mailed givenergy support but didn't hear anything for a day. I rang the support number the next day and they were excellent, they were able to confirm that I was not getting the right capacity, they triggered another calibration run and kept an eye on how things progressed. Haven't had any issues since. I guess my advice would be to ring them rather than e mail. I haven't used the chat function before but I hear this is also good.

c_squared

Thanks, I knew I had seen something similar but couldn’t find the thread again.

So was it just a calibration run that was needed? I’ve now had a response to my email and this was what they said, although I’m unclear whether they are going to do it or whether I’m supposed to.

BarbaraG for the issue I had, it was a calibration that was needed to fix the issue. This was started by the support team, I’m not sure if there is any other way to be honest.

There was briefly an option for a battery recalibration on the inverter card on the beta portal for a bit but I've just checked and it's gone again.

My 8.2kwh battery had some issues but it's been fine since last firmware update and subsequent calibration.

Fingers crossed it gets sorted.

I'm on GO so to avoid unnecessary expense i tend to run this before bed so it does it's charge part of the process in the cheap window.
The option to self calibrate is still there:
New Portal > Inverter Card > Remote Control (Cog in top right corner) > "Battery" Heading > Drop Down Box > Start/Discharging > ">" Arrow.
System should run a full calibration immediately discharging to 0 then charging to 100%