Solar panels charging electric car and draining Giv energy 5.2kw battery.

Hi,
I have just had a 5.2kw battery installed with giv energy inverter. Already having a Indra Car charger which is solar compatible (meaning that it picks up when the system is exporting excess energy to the system).

The morning charges by battery up to 100% but once excess energy diverts to the grid the car charger kicks in an pushes all of the excess solar energy plus all of the battery energy into the car.

I'm just wondering whether there is anyway I can hold back the battery based energy for household domestic use rather than pushing it into the car, but still push the excess energy into the car instead of selling it for pennies to the grid?

Your thoughts would be appreciated?

Many thanks in advance

Chris

Milburn1980 This will be charger dependent. The charger needs the ability to see your battery and affectively ignore it. A lot of people went for a Zappi charger which has this ability. I am not sure what options the Intra charger has? Can you add more CT clamps to monitor the battery? My setup works as follows

• Excess solar up to 1.4kw goes into the battery
• Over 1.4kw the Zappi takes over and charges the car until car is full or solar drops back below 1.4kw
• Zappi can see the battery and will not discharge it in ECO+ solar only charge via a separate CT clamp
• Night time I have a scheduled charge set which will drain the battery unless I have timed charge set for the same time, even then it will drain the battery down to the % I set on the timed charge.

Thank you Thall,

I will go back to Indra with this query.

Thanks for your input

Chris

Milburn1980 The answer appears to be yes it can. Small cost of another CT clamp, these can be installed yourself or can get an installer to do it for their fee.

https://www.speakev.com/threads/indra-smart-pro.159979/page-2

You can also use the API to your advantage. I have the same charger, so I built a little script which checks (via the Indra API) if the charger is doing anything and if so it sets the Givenergy (via it's API) battery discharge rate to 0%. It obviusly sets it back to 100% when the charger has finished.
Works fine BUT i'm afraid it's all using the old Givenergy API code that's no longer available (although still working for now.)

When I get around to updating it your welcome to use it if that's your kind of thing.

I have the same (similar?) setup, just with a Zappi charger.
In my case the answer was NO, as Zappi needs a CT clamp that only works with AC, while my battery is DC.
So please double-check 🙂

I managed to prevent the draining of the battery by setting "Discharge Power" to _500W/h in Battery Options (on the GivEnergy portal). This means that:

• when the battery hits 100% and panels will start to export to the grid, the car charger will see it and if the export is more than 1.4kW (as per car specification) will start to charge the car,
• if the solar production will be lower than 1.4kW/h, the battery will try to help and will start to drain - so will provide up to 500W/h (so panels will need to produce at least 900W/h)
• if the panels production goes below 900W/h the overall output will be less than 1.4kW/h, the car charger will stop to charge the car.
• usually by that time (when the car charger stops) my battery is not full (₈₀-90%), so the battery will start to charge again. If it hits 100% and starts to export again, the cycle repeats (assuming the export is more than 1.4kW)

To note - the 500W/h limit on the battery is for the whole house, so in practical terms panels need to produce around 1.1-1.2kW/h for the car charger to start... it works for me just fine 🙂

With a DC battery I believe can set the Limit to Gen option on the Zappi?

THALL With a DC battery I believe can set the Limit to Gen option on the Zappi?

To be honest - I cannot remember is it AC or DC 🙂 but the electrician and Zappi support told me that my battery from GivEnergy cannot be monitored by the clamp. And the clamp is needed for Zappi to be able to see the battery and act on it. Without it, Zappi thinks the battery is just a solar panel that produces the eletricity...

You can achieve the same thing from within the myenergi app if you set the bar under your Eco+ to around 64%. The system will only charge if there is at least 900w of over generation (export) from the panels, and will top up the rest from the "grid", which in your case will be the battery. If it goes below 900w it will stop.

Just in case you'd like to keep your battery's discharge rate at more than 500w. If that's how you want it (or there's a different reason for you to use it this way) then it's irrelevant!

Most of the times I just put it on Eco during the day when it's nice and sunny out (will pull constant 1400w independently of generation) for top ups and charge during the night during the cheaper tariff. If the battery fills up and there's export then bonus time!

Now if they only would let us put Eco/Eco+ on a schedule... that would be grand.

Hi all,

first post here. Have a PV system with a 8.2 battery. EV on the way next week and would prefer to buy the GE 7kW car charger but like many things from GE its still 'coming soon'! Seeing as its been a while I'm wondering if anyone has any updates on how they may have gotten around the battery/PV/EV charging with a Zappi (or alternative) like @kerik. Is his workaround still the best option?

Thanks in advance

Rich

Firstly the options available to you depend on the type of GivEnergy inverter you have, the AC-coupled has no PV directly connected so must have a separate PV inverter, or a hybrid inverter that has both PV connected and AC power.

The 2 options are covered under this link for the MyEnergi Zappi and related product range.
The AC-coupled inverter combined with a Zappi can benefit from an extra MyEnergi CT monitoring the inverter input/output when it is wired and configured on the Zappi for 'Avoid Drain'.

https://myenergi.info/setting-up-a-third-party-battery-with-myenergi-dev-t6945.html

I have a GivEnergy hybrid inverter, along with a myEnergi Zappi and Eddi, and have found setting the Zappi export margin to 150 W along with a start delay of 60 seconds and stop delay of 120 seconds to work sensibly.

With frequent passing clouds affecting the solar generation or regularly changing household loads there is always some drain from the battery for short periods but it quickly settles down. As I am home when charging the car from solar, I often put the Zappi in Eco mode when the solar excess averages around 1.4 kW so there is a mix of battery charge/discharge that evens out over a few hours rather than the car charge stopping and starting repeatedly. Just have to remember to set the Zappi back to Eco+ as the solar gen drops off significantly below 1.4 kW.

The principle is that the GivEnergy inverter is trying to control to 0 W import/export, at the same time as the Zappi is trying to control to 150 W export. This provides enough separation of the 2 control loops for them not to interact too often.

I do not know if the Indra car charger can be configured in the same way.

You could also have the EVSE wired so it's load is not seen by the inverter (split the incoming tail to feed the EVSE before the inverter CT clamp). This will prevent the battery discharging into the car.

Simon_C Thanks Simon. Very useful info. R

Zakalwe I thought about this option but if the GivEnergy Inverter doesn't see the EVSE load as consumption then it sees it as being exported and as I am limited to 3.68kw of export power then the inverter will clip excess generation leading to a slower than otherwise charge rate to car. I have the 5kw GEN2 Hyb inverter and Zappi and use the same method as described by @"Simon_C" and I find this works well.

Jon-boy lower than otherwise charge rate to car.

The EVSE will be fed from the incoming mains so will be able to charge at the full 7kW rate.

Zakalwe This is true if you are considering situation where you use FAST mode to charge the car regardless of solar generation, however if you want to use ECO or ECO+ modes and limit your charge to only green energy from solar or solar and battery then the scenario I describe above I believe could lead to a limitation in my case.

I bought an EV last week and have changed from Octopus Flux to Intelligent. I am still using the 13-amp mobile charger while trying to decide which EV charger to buy. Today is the 1st time Intelligent has charged the car during the day, and the first thing it did was to drain my 5.2Kw battery. Is there anyway to protect the battery for home use only?
My current work around is that the battery has timed discharge from 5.30am to 11.30 pm (to stop it discharging into the car at night) and Charge time of 11.30 pm to 5.30am.

This won't protect me from today's situation of when intelligence tells the car to charge during the day it drains the battery, but should at least give me a full battery first thing in the morning. Also, any advice on a car charger that would manage this is appreciated.

Flatflyer Assume yours is Hybrid inverter and a manual work around I guess is to limit the battery discharge power to only cover typical house load, say 400w. Down side of this is if you put the kettle or oven on then your pulling from Grid. Alternatively you need to charge the battery at the same time as car. I hear others use Home assistant to automate this

Flatflyer there's a few ideas in here

https://community.givenergy.cloud/d/3128-improved-battery-control-nighttime-restriction-for-car-charging

Some of them are more around how to wire a proper EV charger, but worth knowing in advance to help you consider.