Doesn’t follow house load - sometimes.

I’m confused by my system sometimes not following the house load. Mostly the system does pretty well balancing solar output and battery with household load. But there are periods where there’s charge available in the battery and inverter capacity to use it, yet it decides to charge the battery and import from grid instead. I just don’t understand what it’s doing at these times.

It’s a GIV-HY-5.0-G3 with GIV-Bat9.5.

Right now it’s behaving as expected with a load about 2.5kW being covered by some solar and some battery. But most of today it’s been choosing to import from grid and charge the battery.
Here’s an example (hopefully-my first visit here, apologies for any fat fingered moments)… There’s same steady load of 2.5kW, we’ve got 4.38kW of generation, the battery is charging at a full 3.5kW and so we’re pulling 1.8kW from the grid unnecessarily. This has mostly been going on all day, and it’s also happened on other occasions. Can anyone explain, or help me understand where to look, point me to existing threads or info etc. I just don’t get why the system is sometimes (and for several hours at a time) is choosing to pull from grid rather than dynamically balance load solar and battery? It’s as though it’s prioritised charging the battery yet it’s not set to do that.
Many thanks for any advice, resources etc.

So the battery can not charge and discharge at the same time. Quite why the battery isn’t charging at 1.9kW and leaving the 2.5 to cover the house load is beyond me though I have to admit.

Have you tried dropping into another mode then back to dynamic or eco or whatever the correct mode is?

If you’ve recently upgraded firmware I do remember a mention of some registers having use changed. If there is invalid values in there from the past they may possibly need clearing out and re initialising. That would be a call to GE I suspect.

kram
Thanks Yes I tried toggling between modes in the app. Didn’t resolve anything. I was hoping sending the setting again would help.

I also tried resetting the settings to defaults. After a minute or so it carried on as before.

The system is a fairly new installation we’ve had it about 6 weeks. The first time I saw this behaviour I emailed support and they updated the battery firmware, but that doesn’t seem to have resolved it.

What really confuses me is that most of the time it is doing what I expect it should do, but occasionally it does something like this and for a period of some hours. Then it just resumes behaving normally. The first time it resumed normal operation about a nanosecond after I hit send on the email to support🙄.

Dagr Can you post your flows chart from the portal so we can see if any transients exist or if this is a real problem?

cluelesscris
Erm do you mean something like this one?
This is from the app. Not seeing the combined chart in the portal, but I’m less familiar with the web portal…

Dagr In the portal click on the four arrows top right of the power graph panel to expand it to the main panel.

cluelesscris
So here is a chunk of yesterday. At start and end the behaviour is as I’d expect but in between times when there was a lot more grid import than required. There are times when we’ve pulled more than the battery output can support and / or more than the inverter can support but most times there’s enough battery capacity and/ or enough solar, (or a combination thereof).

Then by way of comparison… today works as my expectations. Early in the day system is importing because battery is empty, but then later it’s following the load with minimal import when there’s some battery and solar to work with.

I think you might need to dig into this a bit deeper. For one thing even though the graph shows 'steady' import, each point is still only a snapshot at 5 minute intervals. Check your actual consumption at your smart meter. Take for example the period 13:00 to 14:00 - a fairly steady 3kw import and load. What do your half hourly smart meter readings show for that period? If it is indeed close to 3kwh then, yes, on the face of it the inverter is not really responding to demand by providing power from the battery. If it is much less then I would suspect part of your demand is ocilating high and low and the inverter is not keeping up. During the day you seem to have a baseline demand of 3kw or more. Way more than ours which is a 10th of that at about 350w. What is demanding all the power and how is it operating? Why did the demand drop to almost zero at 14:00 for 20-30 minutes?

cluelesscris
The early day steady demand was 2.5kW EV charging. Then there’s an hour of 3.5kW immersion heating the water.
On today’s chart it’s also the immersion.

And yes the grid consumption is real. We see it on the smart meter readings (via app) and we can see the current use on IHD which is what alerted us that we were unexpectedly importing.

Dagr Yes but what is the total consumption for the period. Note that some immersions are notorious for intermittant power when approaching or at target temperature. Induction hobs are also culprits if they are switching rather than modulators.

Dagr happened to me as well, try forcing your inverter a restart from the dashboard, if that doesn’t fix it then do a physical restart from the inverter. That sorted it for me.

deepanshus
Thanks will give it a go.