Notifications

Has anyone elses notifications been cleared, ive been getting BMS over voltage faults daily for ages and they have now all gone, my last "alarm" is now showing as in 2023 as a BMS under voltage?

Yes, I have had BMS overvoltage notifications every few days when my battery gets to 100% SOC. They have all vanished. Latest one visible now is 8/4/24

Yes, all my BMS overvoltage notifications have gone, I just have the 3 notifications from system install 8 months ago.

Yes all of mine have been wiped too. Not a great look!

Fortunately I’ve kept receipts. What over voltage alerts? Nothing to see here.

So if our batteries fail, they can tell us that there is nothing in the logs to indicate any issues.

still got 1041 notifications on one of my inverters

GE did the same earlier this year. Notifications reappeared after people called BS on it.

Edit - I suggest everyone affected emails or phones GE support to query why they've removed customer data without customer permission.

all mine wiped also

Me too. Everything back to April 10th wiped out. I smell a rat.

Yes all my previous BMS over voltage notifications have now "gone".
Last weekend GivEnergy did a remote update to my Gen1 Hy 5.0 and 9.5 battery to 3017 after I had asked about the notifications. I guess the update automatically removes them as part of the code (or conspiracy theory GivEnergy remove them as part of housekeeping!!)

Strangely on page 1 of my Notifications it shows 1-5 entries of 16. However, the 6-16 entries are not visible. Same thing for pages 2-4. Page 5 is not visible. Hummmm.

CGoode are you sure that isn’t items rather than pages.

Mine says 1-5 of 6 and I have 5 items on page 1 and 1 on page 2

TX200 Ahha. Yes, 16 entries total over 4 pages my interpretation was wrong. I had many more pages & entries than that since the system was started up in March 23. Something dodgy is going on with the "Over Voltage" evidence trail.

Can anyone from GivEnergy give an official statement about this? To me, it seems like someone is trying to hide something

getting even stranger now, had an exclamation on notifications @ dashboard, but going into notifications nothing new. definately looking like something dodgy going on regarding BMS over voltage faults

I'm slightly concerned when reading up on battery cell overvoltage:

When a battery experiences overvoltage, this means that the voltage applied or present across the battery terminals exceeds its designed maximum. This scenario can occur due to faulty equipment or internal failures within the battery. Overvoltage can lead to several risks and negative outcomes:

Overheating: Excess voltage can cause the battery to heat up. This increased temperature can damage the internal structure and chemistry of the battery, leading to a reduced lifespan or immediate failure.
Gas Generation: In lead-acid and some other types of batteries, overvoltage can lead to excessive generation of hydrogen and oxygen gases due to electrolysis of water within the battery. This can increase internal pressure and potentially lead to the battery casing bursting or exploding.
Electrolyte Degradation: Overvoltage can break down the electrolytes in batteries, particularly in lithium-ion types, leading to the formation of gas and heat, and potentially causing swelling or rupture.
Thermal Runaway: Particularly in lithium-ion batteries, overvoltage can trigger a condition known as thermal runaway, where one failure leads to a series of reactions that continue to increase the temperature and pressure until the battery catches fire or explodes.
Reduced Battery Life: Continuous exposure to overvoltage can degrade battery materials and shorten the overall life expectancy of the battery.
Damage to Connected Devices: Overvoltage can also pose risks to the devices connected to the battery, potentially leading to their damage due to excessive power input.

Fridgeman I also had a notification with no over voltage record.

I’m guessing Giv are deliberately hiding them now.

If you check your battery data you should be able to see when the voltage spikes that would trigger an alert.

Has anyone asked them on FB/X why they're deleting/hiding valid notifications?

Hardly anyone looks here so I doubt GE care if we moan about it here.

Won't look good on their social media though.....

I have an AC3.0 on D0.205-A0.205 with two 8.2 kWh batteries on 3015

This is now:

The two 'Battery Voltage Low' notifications happened when my green battery switch between inverter and batteries tripped. My installer is coming to check this out. I have already had one breaker replaced (last Dec) – the original burnt out! Bt this is unrelated to the missing over voltage records.

It was luck that I had taken a screen shot which I kept. I also take screenshots of any weird behaviour.
The over voltage notifications seem to happen right at the end of a charge from low SOC to max. Usually a 1-2V increase between 96 and 100% SOC.

Rob

Fridgeman Same here. Looked at web dashboard and saw red exclamation mark next to inverter icon - went to inverter notifications and nothing new. Looking at data it shows symptoms of a BMS overvolt which I get almost every time battery reaches 100% SOC.

hoggy Bullshit. Simple as that.

hoggy They may have filtered them out but not from the notifications badge on the inverter tab on the web portal. I have 1 notification in the red badge but none showing on the notifications setting so I can't do anything with it. Thats going to be irritating!

sammoj I noticed that too this morning

For anyone with a G1 Hybrid/AC3 then the above statement from GE simply isn't true IME with various battery f/w revisions but especially 3015.

The "fast response" f/w which Paul Landregan was kind enough to put on my inverter had "support for battery f/w 3015", same as the G2 and G3 inverter owners got back in December.

This cut overvoltage events by 90% almost immediately. Reason is simple - battery charge rate is reduced in 10 steps between 90% and 100% SoC.

Previous inverter firmware ran the battery charge at max rate right up to 100%, resulting in the battery sometimes reaching 58V and one cell at 3.9V (3.65V is max). I've seen emergency overvoltage discharges where the battery is forced to discharge at 300W so this idea that its "nothing to be concerned about" is frankly nonsense.

YMMV of course but if you're a G1 owner then its probably causing damage to cells by exceeding the maximum charge voltage.

hoggy When I got the over voltage alert (AC3 inverter 2 batteries) one of the 2 batteries set its output to zero and wouldn't charge or discharge for a few hours until, I guess, the voltage dropped a bit to clear the alarm (lower temperature or voltage relaxing after charging). Now I will get the battery disconnecting but no alert to tell me why. I'll just have to surmise that if this is just after the battery reaches 100% it is probably a masked over voltage condition. At least I can see the individual cell voltages in the Android app.

I think in my case it is just the 2 batteries getting out of sync with each over and needing a full discharge/charge cycle to be back in sync. It happened after the 2 weeks of poor Agile rates where the batteries didn't quite fully discharge each night before the next days solar charge taking them back to 100%.

This is pulled from another post, and is from an end user NOT a GE employee, so I can't vouch for how accurate it is (a prickly time for spreading potential misinformation) but may suggest that OV limits have been pushed up a considerable degree.

Im a “Guinea pig” on beta 3818 and I can confirm that the regular (daily) over charging and BMS Over Voltage alarms have completely stopped now.

This beta firmware appears to be using a completely different logic to previous versions. It no longer undertakes self calibrations, even when being forced to idle at 4% soc for over an hour. The voltage at 100% soc just appears to stick to whatever was set by the previous manual calibration. In previous versions, the voltage at 100% used to creep up a little with each self calibration until it started to over-charge the battery. I’m not sure whether the next public release will use the same logic as this beta release, but I hope so, because it is working for me.

Regarding the history of BMS Over Voltage alarms disappearing from the Notifications, I think I have an explanation for this. I believe that GivEnergy have raised the threshold for what is considered to be an “Over Voltage” alarm (from 3.7v to 3.9v). This means that what used to be a fault is now considered to be normal behaviour. I must say that I do not agree with this approach as is is simply masking faults in order to make them go away. Having said that, as long as the new firmware prevents the voltage from reaching these levels, I will be happy. The problem is that they have artificially made the problem go way before they have issued the firmware that really fixes it.

hoggy The problem with that approach is that the datasheet for one of the cell suppliers says otherwise in terms of limits.

Ah well, we're stuck with what we have. Warranty claims are going to bite them on the bum but if they're in full beancounter mode that probably doesn't matter to them.

Vestas it's almost gone around full circle if that operating regime is true.
We've gone from fixed setpoint using 1 time calibrations, to dynamic calibrations/OCV on the fly and now back to what sounds like fixed setpoint again based on 1 time calibrations....

hoggy The strange thing is that 3015 and the "fast response" f/w play perfectly well together* and they won't pull the "fast response" bit from the f/w to do a general release.

You still get occasional excursions into unwanted territory but thats back to the elephant in the room - SoC tracking (or the lack of it). Even when it happens, its rare that the SoC is so wrong that the battery is on max charge rate so you don't go wildly over limit - its normally at 60-70% max rate worst case.

I'm not going onto 1 time calibrations, its lunacy given the BMS.

*on a single inverter/battery

Sigh. Was obvious they were going to do this. They’ve been ignoring us for months now.

Trouble is receiving alerts and not knowing what it is will cause major confusion.

Just for the record , happed to me as well. Just left with 3 very old entries in the log.

on loading the web app, I see a notification flag on the inverter, but when I look at notifications, there isn't one.