Is this normal?

This is a bit new to me so your help would be much appreciated. We had a 9.5kW battery and 3.6kW hybrid inverter plus 14 solar panels installed very recently. The system is working well but has a behaviour that seems odd to me! We are on Octopus' Flexible tariff and waiting for our MCS certificate before asking Octopus to move us to a tariff that provides us with a small income from excess energy that we are producing.
My question is, is it normal for the system to push power back to the grid if the battery is not fully charged? I thought that we would not see power going back to the grid until the battery is at a decent % but this doesn't seem to be the case. On a rainy, grey day like today, I would have thought the priority for the system is to focus on topping up the battery and not feeding the grid.

What settings are you on. Look on the GE portal. My inverter in left hand bar, settings along top bar.
Be careful that you have not got conflicting settings if you are using the phone app.

https://kb.givenergy.cloud/article.php?id=7&oid=2

chickenlegs depends how much you are seeing going back to the grid. There's always a lag in the inverter responding to power demand in the home, so if you have the kettle on, the battery supplying it, then when the kettle boils it takes a small bit of time for the inverter to recognise the lower home demand and in the meantime the extra battery power will be exported.

Over the day these fractions of a kW add up but it should all be small beer. Also as the battery fills up it will start to export more until it reaches 100%

SteveCook
The settings page says that we are Eco mode. I have not set any timed charge/ discharge times and is pretty much set up as the electrician left us with the system.

chickenlegs
Eco should charge battery first before exporting (try switching Eco off and saving and then back on again).
You could check the logs (along top line) to see that it is in Eco

I can't see a way to switch the modes off unless that is the "Enabled" slider? There is also only one mode, Eco, that I can see.
Our battery seems to have dropped to 6% today as the weather is so grotty and is labeled as "Idle" on the dashboard. Again, I don't understand why the grid isn't trying to charge the battery up; it seems to be only covering our current home consumption.

chickenlegs eco mode won't charge the battery from the grid just charge it from excess solar. As the weather is grotty it may be there is no spare solar generation to charge at present.

Thank you Brennan, that's very helpful to know. Do most people just pick this information up themselves, or is there a GivEnergy user guide that would answer these sort of questions? The information that we've been provided by the installer doesn't cover questions on the functioning of the inverter, how and if you should set times for charging and discharging etc..

chickenlegs I'm guessing that you are concerned about power cuts and not having enough or any juice in your battery to run a circuit or two in your property? I'm on eco mode but alterted the setting to recharge the battery from the mains during the night, midnight to 1am or 2am typically, so far I'm seeing 4 lights on the battery pack in the morning/most of the day really.

I've not experienced a power cut yet, just trying to be prepared for one.

Also note there's a limit (max = 3.6KW) to the power that can be used to charge the battery - and that limit can be altered in the portal inverter settings.

If your array is generating 5kW and your house load in only 0.5kW, then only 3.6kW can go to the battery, with the remaining 900W exported.

Also after battery is ₉₀% full the maximum charge power tapers down.