Battery sudden drop 79% to 0%

Been expecting it for a while now and it came this morning at 07:00. After several weeks of the displayed SOC never having dropped below 75% (and the battery re-charging to a displayed 100% every day) the true SOC had dropped far enough to initiate the emergency recharge to 4%. Usable battery capacity had reduced to 20-25% of its claimed 8.2kWh and it was dead after discharging less than 2kWh from a displayed 100%. This is a problem which has been known about for some time and a fix is overdue.

Funnily enough a new group has popped up on FB (no its not mine) for disgruntled customers this morning!

If its any consolation I have a bug with my Hybrid which celebrates its 1st birthday next week...
(System prioritises using battery to fulfill load when there is ample PV available for some obscure reason)

hoggy Not mine either (although I cannot say that I am surprised). Battery has now completed charge from 0% SOC to 100% and has accepted 9.4kWh according to the dashboard. Given that it went from a displayed 100% SOC to 0% after discharging less than 2 kWh this morning something is seriously wrong with the BMS!

Woodstock it’s a very odd problem which seems to mostly affect those that float the battery between say 100% and 50% for several days rather than those that run it from 0 - 100 - 0%.
Intrigued as to what the problem truly is (I doubt they’ll say) given I’ve never had any other battery ever “lie/not know” it’s capacity, other than say a laptop when one of its cells fail. (Which I don’t think this is, as the capacity doesn’t decrease once it’s found it’s feet again - unless there’s a big chunk of the buffer gone that you can’t see I guess. Without the cell data that went from the portal its hard to see what’s what, unless that’s why it went….<Dr Evil Laugh here…>

I am seeing this too. Oddly, it only ever happens on one of my two hybrids. The last time, the charge went from about 30% to nothing and then charged back to 4%. It charged to 100% later using solar and took getting on for 10kw of power to do so.

The response this time from tech support (on Thursday 12th) was:
"Sorry for the issues you are seeing - we should have a fix coming for this next week. This will be available through the GivEnergy online portal under my inverters > inverter information > software."

I've started experiencing this too over the last few days with our 8.2kwh battery. System commissioned late April and all was going brilliantly for majority of May. Almost every night the battery would eventually drop to around 50% by dawn - nice, plenty of capacity.

Then one day towards end of May we saw an instant drop from around 55% to 0% followed by a grid recharge to bring it back to 5%.

Things seemed to be going ok again after that, but in the last two days the SOC has been showing very sudden drops/gains with little draw/charge activity. It takes just 45 mins to reach 0% from full after solar generation has ended meaning we are now running on the grid for most of the time during dark hours.

I'm waiting on support for a response - keeping my fingers crossed it's firmware related.

hoggy similar here yesterday - sudden drop from 12% to 0% under sustained heavy load, followed by a rapid recharge to 4%. % SoC had been floating in the mid range for 4 days due to sunny weather and intelligent overnight charging. Not seen before, but battery tends to flatten most days in cooler weather due to ASHP.

I also wonder if it could be related to battery ambient temperature changes if the SoC calculations are based on cell voltage which is temperature dependent.

Same happened for me yesterday. 23% to 0. I was kind of expecting it though as I haven’t had any issues for a while and the battery SOC hasn’t been that low in quite some time. I had a suspicion the SOC would have drifted and wouldn’t be accurate anymore. Doesn’t make it feel any better when you notice it’s happened. There has been mention of a firmware update that will hopefully resolve some of these issues.

Get the battery cabling checked out. This is a classic symptom of a loose connection

c_squared That firmware update has been due for a number of weeks now, guess they want to make sure this does the job as it seems to be becoming a more common issue.

chris_p from my experience, it’s definitely more of an issue when I’m not fully discharging the battery before the next solar generation starts. Hoping it’s resolved with the firmware, it’s quite frustrating to see the grid pull to bring it from 0 to 4%.

c_squared I completely agree, especially as the numbers of "charge today" and "discharge today" don't seem to add up and equate to the battery genuinely being completely empty. However, since I had my battery replaced a couple of months back, I've not had any issues. Yesterday we went to empty due to two heavy cloud days for the first time in weeks and it actually went 6%, 5%, 4% and stayed at 4% until starting to charge as the sun came up

paultottie same problem for me, I'd used the battery heavily on the 5th June and it was at low levels overnight and into the morning of the 6th, then between 0415 and 0420 it jumped from 8% up to 100% during low household background load conditions!

Its been all over the shot since, despite dropping down to 2 and 3% values overnight and early this morning its only taking about a 1kwh of charge.

Tried setting export to dump it down to low levels, which it did but only at the 1kw total capacity point, powered the battery on and off and reset the inverter via the portal, none of which have had any effect.

As for the comm error side I'm getting nothing on the notifications page for the inverter which is where I have seen them in the past. The battery LED are showing a full charge state too so to me that suggests battery controller side not inverter side as I've had a mismatch in the past between inverter and battery.

Also waiting on a support ticket answer and as its likely to be a battery recal the sooner the better as the sun is out!

yandards here's part of the response I have just received from GivEnergy Support:

This is a known issue that a few of our customers are experiencing at present, and we are working on releasing a firmware fix imminently to address this. Your previous conversation with Adam was correct, but unfortunately the update got pushed back for further testing. This is something we are treating as a priority, and will be massed released to your portal once the testing has been completed

paultottie thanks for the info, still strikes me as bloody wierd that some have this problem and some don't - GE must have an idea what hardware is or isn't effected.

I love the system and whilst the SoC drop offs were annoying this is on a whole different level, it's just dead weight at the moment, if this firmware doesn't fix it then I'll be at the end of my patience frankly.

I am one of those that don't seem to see this issue (of high SOC to zero in moments) - though my battery does tend to get fully discharged more often than not.
But I do get a drop from 4% to zero and a Kw or so charge backup. I can pretty much predict when it will happen because I monitor the battery voltages via GivTCP/Homeassistant and NodeRed and can see the voltage drop over time for a given SOC.

anglefire that's the same fault to me as the lower limit should be 4% and cut-off. I'd understand if it went from high discharge and dipped down to 3% but they shouldn't hit 0%. Albeit yours isn't suffering from this to the same degree as others.

From what GE have passed onto various users when it does drop to 0% the SoC versus battery voltage values are reset/corrected.

I don't consider what I see to be a fault, just drift of the voltages Vrs SOC that then get rebalanced.

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anglefire it's not having a significant impact on you and as you mentioned tracking battery voltage gives you early warning it's coming.

I'm assuming your reported SoC is showing 0% on occasion?

But it's not the intended operation of the system either, it's intented to regulate at 4%. With the way battery charging SoC works below 100% I'd expect some drift from that figure depending on load at the time but not that much. 4% is around 8 minutes of operation at max discharge on a HY5 with an 8.2kwh battery.

I'm curious if this issue is apparent for all users but like yours is close enough to normal to not be noticeable.

anglefire When my battery SOC is showing 79% but the actual SOC is 0% I DO consider it to be a fault! Knowing the current true state of charge is fundamental to being able to control the system either manually or automatically. In ECO mode my battery stops charging because it thinks that it is full (displaying 100% SOC) when it is actually nowhere near. ☹️

Woodstock I agree yours is a fault - what I was saying was that my scenario is not a fault just normal (in my view) balancing of the batteries.

Update from my end, a cell had dropped off causing the utter carnage with the SoC.

It's in the process of being reset and recalibrated, fingers crossed it'll sort it.

It's also had a BMS firmware update pushed, currently showing 3007 from 3005.

Sad to report I've had several these sudden dramatic losses too. Glad GE are on the case, and I hope they can find a solution for us all soon.

yandards I had the same issue with a cell that was out of sync. The recalibration resolved the issue for me.

c_squared it's a shame the old battery cell data page from the previous portal isn't on the new one. You could look at cell values then and it might help predict a drop off, if I knew it was coming I could work around it then.

I'd like to know if it's a weak cell in the pack, after all this isn't a universal problem for all users and a FB poll seems to suggest it's all inverter types and battery types (aside from the older 8.2 not full DoD battery). There can't be that many manufacturing updates to hardware resulting in certain builds/versions having the drop off.

So I guess I'm saying is the new BMS a fix for an underlying BMS issue or is it a workaround for cells that are slightly below build specification performance?

Received this yesterday morning from support "Sorry for the issues you are seeing - we should have a fix coming for this in the next two weeks. This will be available through the GivEnergy online portal under my inverters > inverter information > software."

The slight problem being the firmware has been "just a few more weeks" for the last few months...