I'd like a bigger one...!

Hi all,

Dirty minds, the lot of you...!

My 3.5kwh inverter, while good enough for supplying 90% of my homes energy, is limited. My car can take up to 7.5kwh, the house if we're cooking and everyone is home can hit high 7's or 8's... only for relatively short periods obviously.

I have 19kwh of storage and would like the ability, where needed to utilise that more effectively. I'd like to remain in the GivEnergy family, but there doesn't seem to be anything available that I could upgrade to?

Will I have to look outside of this ecosystem or is there another way?

BigAl AIO can supply 6kw, and I think if you link more together (eventually) they can supply more. Would mean lower storage if you jest get 1 and the need for another inverter for any solar, but would be an option.

With a 3.6kW hybrid probably means you are currently under a G98 declaration as it is dead easy to do for the installer.

Increasing inverter output from 3.6kW with additional inverters or an AIO will require a G99 application (/fast track), the additional output can't just be added.

(I assume you mean kW rather than kwh for inverter and car ?)
What sort of chargepoint do you have - can it be configured to draw a lower power for longer ? Or some cars (Tesla ?) can reduce the max power themselves.

I've ditched it now to a dusty corner of the garage but I did fit a secondary DC coupled inverter to mine.
It sat between the PV strings and the GE inverter and injected a further 2.5kW of 'virtual' PV when the house consumption exceeded the GE system.
Looks weird (PV at night) but worked really really well.
Meant I had a 5kW Battery only Givenergy Gen 1 Hybrid which still beats out the current range barring the AIO.

Edit: didn't read the 3.6kW bit, so this setup wouldn't really help you much as your already hamstrung by the 3.6kW limit to AC.
Your EV charger may offer load management if you look through its manual. It will back off charging the car if it gets near your main fuse / DNO limit.

AIO is the way to go with 6kw charge and discharge... once they have sorted out the BMS. Check out "Speak to the Geek" on youtube has a video on adding an AC coupled inverter with batteries to an AIO system. Think it will help you.

Would it ever pay back if your existing setup can support 90% of your demand?

Avenir over 25 years, I'd like to think so and whatever residual value the 3.6 has on the second hand market can offset the majority i would have thought...?

With an AIO being £6k and 13.5kwh storage, that'd give me over 30kwh storage so maybe selling the 3.6 inverter and a 9.5 battery as a package could work if the AIO could be linked to an AIO...?

And yeah, I'm greedy...!

BigAl If you're not cycling the battery at least once a day throughout the year, you'll not be getting a good return. Your current setup already appears to be battery-heavy...

BigAl If there is a second hand market and there are installers who would commission a used system, that would certainly help. Perhaps the alternative would be to get another 3.6kw inverter and run them in parallel, each connected to a separate battery and managed through different accounts. A couple of people on here have done this, I think.

My installer offered me a 3.68kW GivEnergy hybrid inverter, but I insisted on a larger one, and I got a 5kW version even though they had much more onerous paperwork to fill in (and a 3-month delay from the grid operator). The price of the larger inverter was only £35 more (looking on the web).

The extra paperwork is supposedly to check that I "won't overload the grid" with my solar: my house can consume 20kW with everything turned, so how can 6.88 kW of solar be an issue.

It is ridiculous red tape that the government could easily remove if they actually wanted to sort out the climate.

Niceguy It's not what you consume that is the problem, it's what you, and everyone else in your neighbourhood could export that is the potential problem.
Having suffered from 'overvoltage' issues I've tracked our local voltage for a while and it's obvious that the DNO's face quite a challenge, but they do appear to be getting on top of it.

We had a 5kW inverter installed but the installer only applied for G98 and he logged into my inverter remotely and set the grid export limit to 3680 a day after it was commissioned. I don't see that setting in the portal so there must be some hidden registers I can't change.

nophead With the 3rd-party inverter monitor app on android, the inverter settings seem to show an export limit - for me, it's set to 6000W. (I do have G99 paperwork - caused an enormous delay in getting the install :-( )

Yes mine was set to 6000W before the installer changed it. Not sure why for a 5kW inverter though.

6000W is the default 'out of the box' export limit which your installer can move up or down in their portal (but you can't, for obvious reasons)

It would have been nice if the installer had discussed it with us but we only found out about the limit when we got the documentation pack. We only have a 4.4kW PV array but we nearly reached that in September, so I can imagine it will exceed it in June on a sunny day. Our panels are at 25 degrees inclination, so I think they will favour the summer. We don't use much power in the house when the sun is up as our cooking and heating is gas.

I will probably have to wire a Sonoff to power some consuming devices like our dehumidifier and get HA to turn it on when we hit 3680W export to burn off the excess. Perhaps get an Antminer to mine bitcoin. I heard they make about 5p a unit.

I've just gone through the expense of replacing a <1yr old Hy5 Gen 1 with the Gen3 to solve the same issue as the OP: the 2.6KW AC output of the inverter wasn't enough. I now get 3.6KW which is better, but I wanted to get to 5KW peak at least, and preferably to 7KW (so EV charger can work at near-peak).

I suggested all the options I could think of to get to 5KW: AIO, AC3, 2nd HY5, etc, but the installer wouldn't do any of them. Because GivEn don't support the AC3 and HY5 in tandem they were out, and the AIO has a max distance (1 metre?) between it and the main power inlet, and for me there is literally nowhere it could be fitted safely. (My current install is about 12 metres from the power inlet point, which is perhaps not ideal but then life isn't!).

I would concur that GE need to up their game, given the state of play ideally use the 6KW circuit from the AIO and unbundle it into a HY6 with true 6KW AC output. it would make a good addition to their product line. Properly supporting inverter combinations: HY+AC, HY+HY at least, would help alleviate the issue.

However, I did speak to someone at GE support and was told bluntly that this was very unlikely to happen in the next few months at least as other projects were scheduled.

A few points.
The current firmware for the AC and HY inverters does not know how to cooperate with multiple inverters and batteries without getting into silliness about one exporting to the other etc. But with the need and motivation, GivTCP and HA or a bit of python programming could fairly simply turn multiple devices into an intelligent plant that played nicely and could prioritise battery, solar and AC input/output amongst any number of units.

The restriction of distance (gateway, not AIO) between the supply and the device is only that the correct cable should be used and that there must be appropriate overcurrent protection at the ends of the cable. Something that the installer would know if he had read the installation manual...

mrand31 I totally agree. It's a shame to have these inverter combinations off the table at the moment when it could easily be provided by a software upgrade.

I'd like to get an AIO to add to my 9.5kWh battery, and I'm hoping that sooner or later there is a software upgrade that permits this. Happily the market is increasingly competitive so I imagine it's only a matter of time.