Cannot supply house from battery during sunlight

I have a gen2 5kW inverter and 9.5kWh battery and I'm on Octopus Agile. I aim to get my battery to 100% (by sun or cheap power, depending on weather and pricing) by 4pm, then switch to supplying house consumption 100% by battery and solar.
However, I just can't seem to get more than about 500W out of the battery until the sun has gone down and solar is no longer providing anything. This is very annoying as I often end up importing a significant amount of expensive energy even though there's plenty in the battery.
Is there something I'm doing wrong, or is there some hidden settings somewhere?
I did a test today at 4:30pm when the battery was doing it's usual thing of not much. I turned off the DC switches from the solar panels and immediately the battery provided for the household demand. Surely that's not the solution...???
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Clive

Take a look at the inverter card, settings, battery options. Are the sliders for charge and discharge maxed out?

Though based on your DC switch test you best raise this with your installer and GE support.

I have made some progress on this. Finding a manual lying around on the Internet, which mentions that the Inverter has four modes:

1: Solar providing for local load, then battery then export
2: Battery used for local load, backed up by grid
3: No grid, emergency mode, power provided on EPS by PV and battery
4: Battery charging from grid

These modes do not seem to be directly controllable anywhere in the app or cloud portal.
However, the Docker API from britkat (https://hub.docker.com/r/britkat/giv_tcp-ma) includes a setting for "Battery Mode" with possible values of 1 to 4, so maybe this is the way forward? Seems odd that it's not available anywhere else though. I suppose it's "automatic". Unfortunately, I don't agree with the logic.

Clive_Sherborne

Mine behaves exactly as you intend. I have everything set to default, ECO mode on, and timed charge 2am-5am in case I need to bump it up.

I wouldn't think you need to touch those giveTCP things personally. Might be worth going into inverter settings on the portal and resetting to defaults and see how that pans out first...

My Inverter Panel:

Reset to defaults
Eco Mode | Enable

If you have a cheap period tariff and want to charge using it:

Timed Charge and set the period

Don't mess about with any other settings. If you do and you don;t get what you want repeat the sequence above.

Definitely don't touch timed discharge unless you deliberately want to empty your battery as fast as possible.

pacemaker Thanks. I've tried restoring to default settings and that didn't help. Also, without changing any settings, it behaves differently once solar has gone to 0W. Bit odd really.

Clive_Sherborne However, I just can't seem to get more than about 500W out of the battery until the sun has gone down and solar is no longer providing anything

What are you hoping happens?

The standard behaviour is solar will power the house, if not enough solar, then solar+ battery will power the house, if that's not enough then solar + battery + grid.

If your house isn't using much electricity when the sun is going down then solar is covering it, battery won't max out in terms of discharge. Can you show us the power graph for a day where you see the issue?

This sounds a little similar to what I saw recently. Posted here: https://community.givenergy.cloud/d/2051-grid-usage-when-battery-is-full

The battery was full, the solar was less than the house consumption for a good 15-20 minutes, but the inverter preferred to import from grid rather than use the battery.

I know the modes don't switch instantly and it can take 20-30 seconds to change it's mind about something, but in my example shown over a period of an hour, it should have been using the battery to top up the consumption requirements but decided not to. Resulting in importing 0.5kWh from the grid despite the battery being full and the solar generation also being reasonable.

pacemaker I was hoping it would use my battery to power the house when the electricity rate is high, but it doesn't always do that.

LordHippos Thanks, yes that post does seem to agree with my experience.

From 16:00 to 20:00 my import pretty much tracks usage apart from about 500W from the battery. However, showing the grid voltage doesn't suggest it's because of that, as the battery does start taking the whole load even while it's higher. Still the only thing that seems to be affecting it is the few watts coming from the panels.

Clive_Sherborne I think a call or web chat with Givenergy is in order. If there is capacity in the battery when there is no/insufficient PV and your inverter is in ECO mode, the battery should be supplying house load (apart from grid import during ramp up). If yours isn't ask Givenergy to have a look at it and see what they say.

@Britkat I'm using your Docker image giv_tcp-ma which is great, except the SOC keeps getting stuck and I'm seeing this in the log:
Battery_SOC jumped too far in a single read: 10->6 so using previous value
But I know that isn't true - the previous value was 6 according to the MQTT that was emitted. Please can you kindly look into this?

Clive I had the same issue - put reply in other chat (FW) as below:
I have upgraded to the following Firmware Inv: D0.996-AO.908 and Battery 4074 (3.6 Gen2 with 9.5kwh) and the whole system is working much better. The issue with solar pv throttling when battery if near full has gone, the grid import when battery is near fully and solar pv is working has gone. It seems to solved the issue stated in my post above. I am also on Go and managed to top up battery between 0030 and 0430 with no issues

Ask the tech team on the phone to upgrade your firmware

Gordon Brilliant, thanks Gordon!