Battery failure

Wondering if I can get some guidance here.

Last week my battery went missing! Graphs show it charged to 100% then was briefly used and then it just went missing. Not visible from the app. Invertor can't see it ; the usual lights have turned off.

( Only noticed the next day when the lights were not on )

Powered the battery on from the side, bleep! full green lights for perhaps 5s then rapid clicking for a few seconds (is this the Click of Death?), before status led turning red, and the only first two green leds in the power meter staying lit - all briefly, before powering off.

Phoned my installer ; who subsequently phoned GE, who are now waiting to give me a date for an engineer visit - which - I get the vague impression is to initially confirm it was installed correctly.

Details are:

CE2224G179

GIV-AC3.0
D0.535-A0.535 Last updated 2023-08-25 14:03:46 (disclosure - I clicked the firmware update in the app, after noticing the battery wasn't reachable in the app - assumed this was the issue).

Battery Firmware Version
0

Battery Capacity
10 Ah | 0.51 kWh | (1 Pack)

Notifications history:

BMS Under Voltage 2023-08-05 00:09:06 2023-08-05 00:14:07
BMS Under Voltage 2023-07-22 22:32:49 2023-07-22 22:37:51
BMS Under Voltage 2023-07-15 23:41:25 2023-07-15 23:46:27

The battery was operating without any obvious issue as far as I can tell since installation (2 months ago) until it expired.

And specifically on day of The Event:

Spoke with Carla at GE to be told there was at least a 4wk wait for an engineer to visit (and indeed GE are waiting for my installer to pay an invoice to cover the visit before they will schedule an engineer ... ??? ) and from reading the various posts on this forum, that seems to be the norm, plus I should probably anticipate multiple visits.

Any thoughts / suggestions / theories - or should I just sit tight? FWIW - I'm more than comfortable with the idea of doing a local FW update as per https://kb.givenergy.cloud/article.php?id=72 if that's a path to a solution and saves someone long journey. I note some discussion about remotely kicking the system into life ; or beta firmware.

I do however also note some discussion about boards having to be replaced and that makes me very sad.

Cheers everyone.

One more observation that may be of use. If I flick the MCB on the side of the battery (it's 9.5kw model, I believe) to the down position (green, not red) and power on the battery then it comes to life ; no errors and it stays up ... and seemingly full capacity (no indication that the invertor sees it however).

If I flick the MCB back up ... I get the rapid clicks and then it powers off.

Thanks.

Sounds like it needs expert eyes! But as i'm here all I can offer is to get it live as you did by turning the breaker off then power on then via the web portal set the battery discharge power to 0 and see if it stays alive. The electrician in me says it's safer to leave it turned off although would I play with it...of course!

I had pretty much the same issue. Although it was still showing in the app at 0% becasue it wasn't connected. Same thing it would turn on for about 5 secs, then rapid clicking, a beep and the battery would turn off. If the MCB was turned off, the battery would stay on. There were various over voltage messages on the portal.

Basically ended up with Giv engineers coming out. The clicking was related to the inverter - which they replaced. The battery was still turning off after about 5 secs and this was resolved with a new BMS on a second visit. All been fine since.

Mine is Gen2 inverter with 8.2 battery

Sounds very much the click of death.
It's counter intuitive but it's normally the inverter end, particularly if your battery stays on with its MCB switched off.

Sorry...

hoggy agreed that's what happened with mine.

Battery would stay on fine if it was disconnected at the DC breaker. Thus issue is with the inverter not the battery.

It was the inverter relays broken.

They said 3-4 weeks for engineering visit. Inverter was swapped out at exactly two weeks post the date it failed.

Bobbles I left my inverter turned on whilst faulty. Left the battery breaker disconnected and the battery off.

That way I still collected stats about import, export and household usage.

Although that does mean the inverter is costing me money to be switched on, whilst not providing any other benefits. But I chose stats over cost!

Thanks everyone for your responses. I guess it's a case of waiting patiently for someone to arrange an appointment. Hugely frustrating situation - but no point getting angry about it I suppose.

Just a brief (and positive) follow up to this.

GE engineer was booked in last week, arrived yesterday, confirmed the battery was sound, and replaced my Inverter. All done and dusted within the hour.

Really knowledgeable, and helpful bloke. Enjoys a good mug of tea + biccies.

Big shout out to Carla at GE and Matt the Engineer ✌️ plus everyone in this community who contributed to the thread. You're all good people.

Looks like I’ve got exactly this problem with one of my Gen 1 hybrid inverters.

Noticed tonight that one of my batteries was reporting 87% full and the other 5% - they’re on different gen 1 inverters so this is weird.
Checked the SoC history and no change to SoC since mid afternoon.
GivTCP reporting continual errors unable to get battery info so was just repeating the last value.
Restarted GivTCP, nothing different.

Looked at the battery, it was turned off. Turned it on, full row of green lights, status went green, then a series of clicks inside the battery, status went red and battery turns itself off.

Checked the Battery BMS to inverter cable was in the inverter OK, put the meter cable back in (initially in the wrong socket!). Found this article. Its the same behaviour, battery stays powered on if the circuit breaker is turned off, but clicks and powers off if the circuit breaker is on.

Will call GivEnergy tomorrow.

Back to just the 5.2kWh battery. Sigh.

geoffreycoan
After all the help you have given us all, you don't deserve this.
Hope you manage to get the issue sorted swiftly.
Best of luck.

Rob

geoffreycoan

Suggest moving batteries to 3012, had similar issues with twin 8.2's. The cell voltages were all logical but the SOC values were wrong.

geoffreycoan Update from today, phoned GivEnergy support this morning, took a little while on hold (previous recent calls to them have been answered pretty much instantaneously).

Explained the problem, the 2nd line support engineer could see when the battery went offline yesterday afternoon and from my description of the problem he agreed that it sounded like the inverter issue described here.

He asked me to take a video of the battery being turned on and then turning itself off with the circuit breaker on, and another of the circuit breaker off and the battery being turned on and remaining on. Wanted to be able to hear the battery clicking on the video.
I did that and uploaded the videos to google drive so he could see them (too big to email).

2nd line have seen the video and have "raised it to the seniors to get an update on what next". Been told its possible I will have an update on Monday.

Not quite sure what the seniors need to do, this seems to be a problem that others have had and for which the fix (replace the inverter) is known, so would just think it'd need approving for engineer replacement under warranty.

I'll update on what happens next. Mega sunny and cheap weekend coming up with just the one battery. At least the PV on the failed inverter is still working fine, its just the battery to inverter that doesn't work,.

@Newman I don't think 3012 would improve things, the battery and inverter are not talking together at all now. I have two Gen 1 inverters each with their own battery, one 9.5 and one 5.2, and one inverter has stopped talking to the battery. The other is fine. So far 3015 as been OK for me, no noticeable SoC issues at all but I do fully charge and discharge the batteries every day

geoffreycoan How long since new battery - and inverter f/w was installed?

Vestas How long since new battery - and inverter f/w was installed?

The new 9.5 battery with 3015 was installed on 28th Feb (on that inverter) and the inverter firmware was upgraded by GE support about a week ago

geoffreycoan Just curious - that's the fast response f/w yeah?

geoffreycoan the fix (replace the inverter) is known

From what others have said, that does seem to be the fix. Unfortunately it will reset the meter counters, even if the serial number is transferred. If the faulty inverter is later repaired there is a risk of duplicate serial numbers. I think it would be better if the engineer just replaced the battery control board.

I do not know why the battery board has failed, but thermal stress may be a factor, resulting from poor battery connection. When it was working did you check the cable temperatures at all? I use a cooking thermometer to check mine.

Rubikcube Yes its annoying that when the inverter is replaced the meter counters will reset.
The important ones I use in Home Assistant are all wrapped up in Utility Meters (advice I took from an early Speak to the Geek video) so at least swapping to the new inverter means I just need to change a few UM’s and I should at least retain some history there, but for history that’s currently only in the portal I think I’ll need to investigate the download scripts to save a copy before it gets lost.

Of course the utility meters are only as good as the underlying sensor. I noticed last night that the grid import and grid export sensors were both reporting zero all the time, and that’s I think down to the failing inverter that has decided its now got a meter comms fail. The wires are correctlyt plugged in the front-most socket on the underside of my Gen 1 so its probably a symptom of the inverter’s death rather than something I can fix. For now I have changed the import and export UM’s to collect data from my other inverter and guess I’ll have to decide whether I can be bothered fixing 2 days of HA sensor history.

I think there might have been some clues of the imminent death of the inverter earlier in the week. On Monday I got (I think) a high temperature HA alert from the inverter, but of course I can’t find it now to be sure. But also on Monday the EPS circuits repeatedly switched on and off which led to corruption of my HA PC https://community.givenergy.cloud/d/4276-recovering-home-assistant-without-a-backup
Other than this, no pre-warnings. I don’t check the cable temperatures and don’t have a thermal camera.
Would have thought the installers fitted the new battery correctly, its screw thread bolts that secure the battery cable terminal connectors on the inverter so not much can go wrong with that?

Vestas not entirely sure what the firmware is supposed to fix. Its a version that’s not on the firmware kb. I’ll ask the GE support engineer who installed it.

geoffreycoan I'm just curious as to whether predbat and the fast response f/w "play nicely". Someone else using predbat (not on here) had much the same happen about a month ago in terms of beta f/w and inverter going pop a couple of weeks later. Most likely coincidence....

Vestas AFAIK the “fast response” firmware is supposed to just respond to changes in PV and load quicker so there’s less delay in the inverter switching between charging & discharging the battery.

So shouldn’t be a conflict with predbat which after all only runs every 5 minutes to re-program what it wants the inverter to do based on load, PV, etc.

And there are people like Oli of speak to the geek that are running an AIO and an AC-3 together with HA scripts to detect and stop the two inverters cross charging. From what I understand these scripts are running very rapidly, every 30 seconds or so? (maybe less) to change battery charge/discharge rates when cross charging is detected. Would think that’s hammering the inverter registers more than predbat is.

But 🤷‍♂️

geoffreycoan 2nd line have seen the video and have "raised it to the seniors to get an update on what next". Been told its possible I will have an update on Monday.

Update from Carla-Jo, the Field Service Administrator at GivEnergy today to tell me that it is now with the site visit team, I’ve been added to the planner and they’ll let me know when the appointment is confirmed.

The field services team is fully booked for the next 2 weeks but they’ll let me know of any cancellations.

So progress but not a date for resolution yet. Judging from what others have said it sounds like there’s more field service engineers than there was 6 months ago and I won’t be waiting months. But we’ll see

geoffreycoan I'm curious as to why the warranty process hasn't been followed?

Surely the installer should be replacing the inverter?

Don't get me wrong, I think its unreasonable to expect the installer to honour the manufacturer's (changing) 5-10-12 year warranty, but I was under the impression that's what GE expect?

Vestas Surely the installer should be replacing the inverter?

Hmmm I think GE realise that the installer based is not great, so easier and better to have a dedicated team.

I am glad they do as my installation experience was poor and I doubt that they would come back... (If I had any issues, fingers crossed...)

Watching the thread with interest...

Hope it gets sorted for OP soon...

Vestas geoffreycoan I'm curious as to why the warranty process hasn't been followed?

Surely the installer should be replacing the inverter?

A good point. The inverter has been installed just over a year now and TBH I never thought of contacting the installer and just contacted GE directly.

I would have been concerned about the installer and GE bouncing the issue between them (which has happened), so at the moment I’m glad that GE are planning on coming out to replace the inverter, seems a simpler option to me

Here’s my report post the GivEnergy engineer visit yesterday.

Overall I’ve been pretty happy with the GivEnergy warranty claim/replacement process. End to end it was 2 weeks 6 days precisely from me reporting the issue to having the system repaired. 1 day to report and agree that there was an issue, half day for the warranty replacement to be approved, then 2 weeks 4 days before the engineer was onsite.

Talking to the engineer he said that GivEnergy now have 8 field service engineers. He joined in October last year and since then 3 more have joined the company. Customer wait times have decreased in the time he has been there from months to a couple of weeks.

The engineer pretty quickly diagnosed that it was a failed battery board, here’s the inside of a gen 1 hybrid inverter in case you ever wondered…

He had a replacement Gen 1 hybrid on the van and swapped it over for mine. Here’s where it got interesting, the one he brought out of the van said G98 3.6kW on the side, not G99 5kW as mine was. I queried this and he explained that both inverters were the same, the rating/power output was controlled in software and he just reconfigured mine to be a G99.

The other thing that surprised and impressed me was that they were able to carry my old inverter serial number over, again changing the inverter serial number in software so the commissioning process didn’t need to be repeated, the inverter appears the same on the portal (and GivTCP/Home Assistant), and the import and export cumulative meter readings continued without break as well.
One minor wrinkle which I spotted later that night was that the cumulative PV generation figure reset to zero with the new inverter. I queried this with GivEnergy support today and they told me that that was ‘mastered’ in the inverter and unfortunately wasn’t something that they could change back to the old reading. So in the portal you can see my cumulative PV figure reset back to zero. Not a massive end of the world though.

There was a slight moment of jeopardy when he turned the 9.5kW battery on for the first time, there was a series of relay clicks from the battery and then it synchronised successfully with the new inverter. Apparently sometimes when the inverter battery board fails it can break the battery BMS board as well, but wasn’t the case for me.
In fact the battery came back with the same 87% SoC it had been on when the inverter stopped talking to it 3 weeks prior.

The engineer installed the 191/193 ‘fast switch’ firmware I had originally, set the EPS countdown timer to zero and we did a couple of tests confirming that the PV and battery were all working fine.

Having done all that he started the battery calibration. Another positive is that he only needed to calibrate the one inverter/battery pair. The other inverter/battery pair was unaffected and I was able to let it continue supplying the house.

And here it is charging up nicely …

Paused the battery charge at the start of Agile peak yesterday and resumed it and finished the calibration this morning. All working great.

Pointless trivia but this little black box is the difference that enables the newer Gen1 inverters to run the fast switching firmware.
Older ones don't have it.

hoggy Not possible to retro fit the little black box or is it part of the battery motherboard ?

geoffreycoan the import and export cumulative meter readings continued without break

The import and export readings come from the EM115, which hasn't changed.

The 4 meters held by the inverter (PV Gen, throughput, input, and output) will have been lost (reset to zero if it's a new inverter or whatever the previous owner had if it's reconditioned).

Changing the serial number is normal, but be aware that there is now a duplicate inverter. If your old inverter finds its way back online, strange things will happen in the portal !

Thank you for posting all that useful information.

geoffreycoan could be retrofit (there was actually talk of a program to do this at one point) but given removing the front voids warranty unless your GE it never got off the drawing board. Which is understandable given I'm sure people would prefer them to spend time keeping warranty wait times down than doing that.
I still don't quite get why there isn't a "slow, Faster firmware - say 191S-193S" to bring parity of operation across gen 1 fleet. So they all atleast operate the same. As far as I can see your control board is the same (the board with the led on is "CTRL V1.0 rev A" same as mine that doesn't support fast firmware)

hoggy I still don't quite get why there isn't a "slow, Faster firmware - say 191S-193S" to bring parity of operation across gen 1 fleet.

Money/dev time is the only reason I can think of. Hence talk of "business decisions"....

Vestas yes most probably, although equally the portal / app / api still has to be maintained to account for it so probably not a massive time saving over the entire company dev time.
Edit: maybe the Cems unit can run singular and therefore that is the way forward if early gen 1 wants the newer pause slots, ethernet... etc. Although maybe they too will be restricted to the newer FW gen 1 as they too presumably default to "fast" which roasts the old ones? Who knows.

hoggy Well if there was a f/w update without fast response then they could roll that out as normal, then decide what to do (if anything) about rolling out the f/w components which require fast response and therefore depend on date code.

At least that way the G1 inverter would be "feature-complete" - which it isn't at the moment as Timed Demand doesn't work on D450-A451. Also it'd have CRC checks on comms which definitely have a beneficial effect.