Predbat/automation and calibration

Hi, I have been running predbat successfully since January taking the updates as they have been offered, but last night I noticed that my battery SOC had reached 0% (not the usual 4% minimum) and Predbat was reporting a status of "calibration".

At some point the SOC rose again to 9% but has stuck there all night and the "calibration" status still shows.

I have tried switching Predbat to readonly and then resetting the inverter defaults but the calibration status remains.

I think the problem is with the inverter/battery not Predbat, but something seems to have confused it. While in Predbat read only, if I force a timed charge on the inverter it will charge, but Eco does not start the discharge of the battery. The app/portal shows my battery as greyed out.

I have asked Givenergy to take a look, but wondered if anyone else has experienced this and knows the cause/ how to avoid or recover the problem?

My inverter is a gen 1 3.6k and my battery a 9.5kWh
Thanks
Ben

It’s a problem with your inverter/battery that has put the battery into calibration mode.

Predbat won’t do anything whilst the battery is calibrating- a full discharge then a full charge.
There is a faq on this https://springfall2008.github.io/batpred/faq/

If the battery isn’t doing the calibration properly, you’ll need to talk to GivEnergy support

And just to clarify, predbat is only reporting that the inverter calibrating the battery, it can’t initiate the calibration.

Thanks geoffreycoan. Since posting, I have found a few other posts on the topic from you and others! All good input.
There is no sign of any calibration happening with my battery. It is just sat there. It will take a charge from PV or grid, but I cannot get it to discharge.
I read one thread suggesting that the registers may be corrupted. I changed the discharge rate from 2600 then put it back, in case this had been corrupted and set to zero, but this hasn't worked.

I guess I need to wait for Givenergy to reply. I have left Predbat in read only for the time being until I can see the inverter/battery are working correctly.

I have done some more clicking around in the portal, following some thoughts from this thread... https://community.givenergy.cloud/d/4218-idiot-guide-battery-idle-stuck-at-x

I have found that while Predbat is in read only, I can force a discharge by disabling eco and enabling Timed Export (setting an appropriate time window). That has got me through the expensive agile period tonight.
But the moment I re-enable Predbat, Predbat reports a status of "calibration" and Eco turns back on and the export stops. When I check the portal, export has been disabled too. I couldn't get Timed Discharge to work at all, with/without disabling Eco.

I am still waiting for a response from Givenergy on what has gone wrong, but something is still wrong and Predbat still thinks my battery is calibrating....

BenS have you checked the GivTCP logs that it is communicating correctly with the inverter and its not a stale status that GivTcp/predbat has got?

If you are able to manually force Eco & Timed Export (I assume in HA) then this sounds unlikely. You could also try restarting HA, GivTCP, etc just to get fresh data from the inverter.
Its also weird that you can control what the battery is doing, if Predbat thinks its calibrating and it is calibrating then you shouldn’t be able to control it to do anything at all. Which is what made me think it was stale data in GivTCP?

I find if you phone givenergy they answer the phone reasonably quickly. Sending emails can take a day or so for a response.

geoffreycoan .
Thanks again.
Predbat thinks the battery is calibrating, but I see no sign of this on GE portal. I will see if I can find the Givtcp logs and check if there is anything apparent there.
I have been using the portal to force the discharge so the comms could be stale I suppose.
Its odd that turning predbat read only off, does stop the export though. If predbat thinks the battery is calibrating, I thought it would change nothing.

Regardless, I dont think the battery is working properly, as taking predbat out of the picture, turning Eco on should allow the battery to supply a load and it does not. I can only force the discharge by using the timed export.
Assuming no recovery overnight, I'll take you advice and ring GE in the morning.

I've had this issue twice. I believe it's a corrupt message (or isn't error checked) when the inverter receives a command and triggers a calibration. My system went randomly into calibration mode when predbat asked for 2600w charge overnight in the cheap window. What I have done is to change the self_run_loop_timer in GivTCP from the default of 5 seconds to 30 seconds a few weeks ago. I haven't seen this issue since.

cbowen I have heard that having the self run timer set to too low a value can result in the inverter getting overloaded, unable to process requests from the portal for instance as its spending all its time responding to Givtcp enquiries. Possibly the corrupt message causing a calibration is another cause of this.

I have my self run timer set to 20 seconds and have put advice in the predbat docs to not set it to too low a value for these reasons.

Cheers

Thanks guys.
I have now had the issue fixed by GE.
They confirmed there was no calibration actually taking place, however they could see that the inverter/battery was refusing to supply load under Eco.
I think the issue was corruption, not sure where, but I think they read and re-wrote a number of settings which are not available to the user.

I had a similar problem a while back when using one of the smart tariff automations. It seems there is a vulnerability to this happening from time to time.

I will look into setting the self run timer as you suggest.

In fact that was easy to find.
It was already set to 15, but I have increased to 20.