Checking the Givenergy app and portal I no longer see an option for "timed discharge". I used this when preventing the battery being charged from solar until the "timed charge" period hit, so it would only be used to provide top-up power should the PV be insufficient.
How is this done now because I've see no information on what achieves this same setup given the "timed export" doesn't do what I want, which would see the battery being discharged?
bunny What model of inverter do you have, and what firmware. Gen-1 behaves very differently from other systems in this regard.
DD I think it's a Gen-1 inverter but the firmware is D0.450-A0.451
bunny there's another very similar thread from yesterday:
https://community.givenergy.cloud/d/4624-timed-discharge-disappeared-from-android-app-options
DD Given this happened on the portal and both Android and Apple apps I'm going to assume this is another instance of Givenergy changing things without notice/warning and for the worse. They already made it more complicated by splitting out the different items on the settings page into separate dropdowns but removing one that's still available in the battery is confusing.
There's also no ability to set the "SOC % limit" because I always get an inverter timeout when attempting to read that setting. The other options work fine, just those two ("Charge 1" and "Discharge 1") timeout.
Overall, very confusing they would outright remove an option that I need and is still available if you dig deep enough into the settings.
bunny I agree with lack of information from GE is pretty appalling. However, it is possible to describe this as a bug-fix.
For as long as I've had my system, the description of "timed discharge" has not matched the actual behaviour. It's documented as powering the house only during the timed window, and idling the battery at other times. On my gen-3, it used to power the house at other times, and export to the grid during the timed window.
They've now changed it to actually implemented the documented behavour, using the pause-battery feature. I believe the pause-battery feature is not available on (some) gen-1 systems. Perhaps that's why it's not shown on your app ?
The previous behaviour of timed discharge is actually just the trvial merging of "eco" and "timed export". Each maps to one underlying flag. Timed discharge just set both. So if you could get past the annoying UI, you'd get the old behaviour by setting both. However, the UI conspires against you by insisting that they are separate "modes", and turnng one on turns off the other. Going via the remote control page (or the API) gets round this.
The SOC % limit is possibly again due to a limitation on your gen-1. Newer systems have both a master reserve %, and a per-discharge-slot %, The latter does not exist on (some ?) gen-1 systems. At the modbus level, attempts to read non-existent registers are just ignored, manifesting in a timeout.
What's weird is that most people complain the the UI actually sets the master one. So this isn't really consistent with attempting to read the per-discharge slot one. Can't really explain that,
The change to the iOS version actually happened quite a while back. I first noticed the change to the timed-discharge via the portal, and immediately realised that the previous version of the android app would not be able to access it, since it was rather stricter in its enforcement of being in one of the 3 modes, which must have been why they'd rev-ed the iOS interface to look more like the portal interface.
Or are you saying they've only just recenty rev-ed the iOS app again, to remove timed-discharge? (I should mention that timed discharge is available to me via the app.)
DD I'm not sure when the change was made but I know I used the timed discharge in the iOS app last Saturday 15th June and when I went to use it yesterday (20th June) it wasn't available. It might be that my phone has updated to a release made prior to the Saturday but such a change was an unwelcome adjustment given I'd established what I needed to do after trial-and-error and now have to redo it.
Using the iOS app I cannot set timed export and eco, turning one on turns the other off so that's not a viable combination. What's more confusing is I see the inverter has picked up the settings from the app (checking the Remote Control History log) without me hitting "submit" in the app so the UI is actually worse than I thought. Changes are made without the user expecting them to be.
bunny Using the iOS app I cannot set timed export and eco, turning one on turns the other off so that's not a viable combination.
I'm pretty sure that's just the UI being stupid.
timed-export corresponds to the remote-control page flag 'enable dc discarge' (as you probably gathered from the activity log). That page should let you turn them both that and 'eco mode' on.
For iOS there is a free "bbcbasic" third-party app kicking around. Maybe that will let you do what you need. Search this forum for references. (I've not tried it.) The bbcbasic app is also available for Android, as is the other app linked from the thread I linked above.
bunny 'm not sure when the change was made but I know I used the timed discharge in the iOS app last Saturday 15th June and when I went to use it yesterday (20th June) it wasn't available.
Ah. Okay. I believe the change to the interface to match the portal happened a while back. perhaps timed-discharge was still there, and was only recently dropped when they reimplemented timed-discharge.
DD I can see "Enable Eco Mode" set to "true" and "Enable DC Discharge" is automatically set to "false" at the same time in the logs so it's not an app issue. I'm going to take this as the functionally being removed from the app and resort to working out how to use the portal to get what I need. Thanks for the helpful suggestions.
bunny I can see "Enable Eco Mode" set to "true" and "Enable DC Discharge" is automatically set to "false" at the same time in the logs so it's not an app issue.
I'd say it is an app issue: it's the app that's explicity telling the inverter (via the cloud) to turn on eco and turn off enable-dc-discharge.
If you just set those flags directly in the remote control page (or through the API) they should operate independently.
bunny ah... I've just remembered something... In order to export to the grid, a gen-1 does need eco turned off. So maybe the UI is actually doing something slightly helpful.
But you don't actually want to export, just to enable the export flag. So might just be the UI being too helpful in this case ?
Well this has changed things a bit everything was working just as I needed with eco set timed charge and timed discharge set
but now
no charging overnight even though timed charge is set ?
Why did they mess this about
For my system I never used timed discharge as I had heard it was unreliable.
So since they did the sneak app update and as I have time to play with it I did some tests yesterday.
The App timed charge works as expected and puts eco mode back on after the charge.
The timed export option as soon as you set it, even if some hours ahead turns off eco mode!!!
So you can only really use it if you are exporting soon.
It leaves eco mode off, so you need to pair it with a timed charge...
How do you check your firmware version?!
Wish they would introduce the ability to automate things a bit more! When exporting, I would really like it if you could set the inverter to automatically switch back to Eco once the battery is at a certain percentage.