GivEnergy portal offline?

I am getting Server Error messages when I try to access my GE dashboard via the web portal on my pc.
On the phone app, I have been logged off and cannot connect.
I have internet connectivity just fine for everything else.

Is the entire portal offline? I'm currently exporting.. please make it come back soon so I can stop the export!

Yes, no access to app or portal for me either

Same situation just happened with me. I’m getting an error 500 on the cloud website and it’s logged me off the iPad GivEnergy app. Hopefully the server will be back up soon.

Yep, looks like a an outage. Never great on a Friday.

Hook No, Friday’s not a good time. I just tried calling software support, but I imagine everyone has gone home for the weekend.

I’ve just got through to technical support and they are aware of the issue and are working on it.

Same here, this is the second time it's happened recently. Last time was when the installers were trying to commission my system which was not good

Same here too ... must be same for everyone.

A bit annoying that it disconnects u from app as well, could leave at least local mode working in those situations..

Tomuks Yeah, that surprised me too. At least I can still see some data using my Zappi app.

Am starting to get really peed off now. I have to go out shortly, and want to stop exporting for Flux before I leave!

It stops working in local because the app checks it’s your actually your inverter still before allowing local access.

Presumably done so anyone who happens to be on your Wi-Fi from just being able to download the app and mess all your settings up/cause havoc.

hoggy in reality if you're on the WiFi network all bets are off. The local comms with the inverter is completely unsecured, you just need to figure out the IP which is trivial in most consumer home networks. So at best this is "security" through obscurity.

I know, just stating why the app doesn’t work that’s all for those wondering.

miffy that's exactly my problem - I'll end up pulling from the Grid.
Local access should be a default requirement to at least alter your settings.

94jdh and this is exactly why I only buy home automation equipment that has local control. Vendors are unreliable, go out of business and impose arbitrary limitations to your control. I own the kit, I will run it my way. I've automated my Flux switchover because I have the incentive to get it done.

hoggy There is no reason for it to be like this though. It's possible to securely authenticate users locally without any need to query the GE servers. Too many programmers don't think about redundancy in their systems, or what happens when certain parts of the system fail.

Dewet

Dewet GivTCP?

Current state of play.

503
The portal is currently down for maintenance. Please wait while we restore the service

@TheDragon (GivEnergy) TheDragon is having a weekend off, he must have forgot to put 50p in the meter to keep the server running. Paul, put that beer down and put some money in the meter 😛

ProximusAl will go find a 50p. Meter won't take card

Yes, but again I’m just repeating why it doesn’t work as is for everyone.
There’s several ways locally still as an option- there’s atleast 2 third party apps that will talk to the inverter in app stores right now.
Moving to Home Assistant @Dewet wrote the entire modbus library that GivTCP and Givenergy_local run on.

..and if ECO was automatically switched back on after timed export ended I would not now be drawing from the grid at Peak Flux

miffy Entire portal down.
Devs are working on it, to find out the resolution.

Normal service will resume ASAP

94jdh Is that a question?

Dewet It's only insecure if you set it up wrong. The installers are supposed to follow the wifi setup guidelines which does set up reasonable security, although our engineer was incompetent when it came to computer stuff, so we set it up ourselves. We have our inverter on a separate guest wifi network that has no ability to talk to anything else on our network, the wifi connection is encrypted, and has a strong password. All internet comms go through a Pi-Hole for filtering and logging. The inverter wifi AP has a new strong password set, and we have the passwords written down and stored securely elsewhere.

I have turned my batteries off. I assume when the portal is up again that turning the batteries back on will result in export resuming but at least i can turn the export off then.
plenty of solar to run the house for the next hour.

If you’re using the mobile app and are on the local network, it really should failover to a direct connection when the portal goes down..

It seems a bit daft for the whole thing to just collapse in upon itself when this happens.

its back up (portal)

miffy You're describing something very much different to "most consumer home networks" which I took pains to make explicit. Furthermore, you're talking about the Wifi dongle, which is not what I'm referring to – the inverter, once connected to your network in whatever way, is accessible via modbus locally which has no authentication whatsoever. You can indeed fence it off using a DMZ but that is not what the vast majority of consumers even care about.

TheDragon (GivEnergy) I don't suppose there is any scope to turn off forced export for anyone who started exporting for Flux and now can't get back on to stop it?! I really wasn't planning on exporting my entire battery!
Thankfully, tomorrow is supposed to be reasonably sunny here..

and down again lol

and up again. looks ok now

Not quite right yet. A lot of the cards won't load.

TX200
mine did all load and i managed to reset to defaults but it seems to have just died again, I assume it will be like this for a while, it could be everyone trying to get in overloading teh servers (he who knows nothing btw)

Dewet it certainly was!

I think I've managed to stop exporting now! It's going to be a close-run thing as to whether I can get to 2am and cheap flux charge time before I run out of battery power. We've decided to get a takeaway this evening to save cooking!

miffy it's a Friday so why not!!

(Even if a takeaway is many times more expensive than putting the oven on for a bit 🤣)

Seems to be working now. Thank you to the software and IT engineers for getting things back up and running.

TX200 Yeah, well it's a good excuse for a takeaway! The teen daughter was nagging for pizza.
Friday night is usually computer gaming night in this household! We may or may not flatten the solar batteries before we finish..

I’ve always thought A “nest”esque smart thermostat with a decent screen which doubles as a local interface to the inverter was a no brainer personally.
Also added bonus is that the inverter would know when the heat pump was running (not much point it knowing about gas) so could throttle battery discharge appropriately.

I think local control for when the portal goes down is a high priority need now.
just the basics would do, restart inverter, set to eco, pause and resume.

positor1 Yes, that would be very handy, especially as the inverter and battery don’t have any physical controls, unless I’m missing something.

I thought the app was supposed to at least show what was going on at home mode, if not also be able to control it. But seems that's not the case!

Couldn't even get to the home mode / away mode buttons!

I've got GivTCP setup in docker on my laptop. Not running, but can start it up, query the system and send commands if desperate. And if GivEnergy disappeared then I'd probably look at Home Assistant to have something running permanently.

I used the pdf guide on the unofficial wiki to get everything setup. Plus some tweaks to the configuration/variables (think something like inverter_ip1 instead of inverter_ip or something like that).