Charging Battery from AC

I rarely charge my batteries (2 x 19.5 kWh + AC3 Inverter) from AC mains as I'm not on a cheap overnight tariff and have plenty of solar panels. As it's winter here in the UK and the sun rarely shows its face, yesterday I decided to give my batteries some excercise and adjusted some setting initially in Home Assistants GivTCP addon to set the batteries away charging and then let it. Some time later I checked back and to my surprise the batteries were only charging at 291w.
I logged into the GivEnergy web portal and checked / adjusted a few settings (set points down then back upto MAX) but still no change.
My batteries and inverter are in our utility room so maintain a pretty constant temperature.
Last night when I went to bed I thought it may be to do with the fact that the batteries levels haven't moved much lately above my set reserve of 10% and so some smart hidden setting might do a trickle charge for a certain time period. But when I got up this morning they are still charging at 291w with the combined battery charge at 32% (29% + 35%) but I can see form Home Assistant that the charge rate spiked to 2884w for about 5 minutes at 01:00am.
Any ideas folks?

Graham_Harrison sounds very strange. Assume you have confirmed that the battery charge rate is set to max in HA/GivEnergy Portal and that you have correctly set the charge start and end times and turned ‘enable charge schedule’ in HA.

Check you don’t have battery pause mode set to Pause charging and you have target soc set to 100%

then maybe need to do a reset to defaults and restart your inverter from the portal if its still not behaving

geoffreycoan
Cheers for the help, Yes I'd set charge rate to MAX but I hadn't set any times as I didn't know I needed to.
As soon as I set a start and end time (start 00:00 / End 23:59) in the official web portal my charging rate jumped to 2887w.
Every day is a school day. I've done a manual charge once or twice in the past and never set a schedule so I'm assuming something has been changed by GivEnergy since I last did it.

Graham_Harrison you do need a start end time for the charging period as otherwise the inverter won’t know when to charge. It could well be that you had these set from a previous charge through the app and they’d just persisted when you did a HA charge.

Alternatively you may have used the force charge control select.givtcp_xxxx_force_charge - you can select a duration for the charge and the appropriate underlying controls are set.

I have some HA scripts to set my inverters to charge, Eco and discharge modes so I make sure that the inverter is in a fully known state each time. Trouble with controlling via HA is that its low level controls and easy to get them wrong

Glad you are sorted

Cheers

geoffreycoan Trouble with controlling via HA is that its low level controls

Please could you explain in simple terms a little more about how the controlling via ha and the portal or app differ.

I only use home assistant to monitor my system in an attempt to understand a little better how the components interact but I don't make any changes to the inverter via home assistant. 95% of the time I use the app and occasionally the portal to make adjustments to timed charge/export.

I have heard of term high level or low level controls but don't fully understand.
Thanks.

Robgy sorry but I don't know Low level controls differ to any other.
BTW I now realise I had used the "Force Charge" option in the past.
I've tried a "Schedule" charge & a "Force Charge" and both appeared to work fine.
I'm not setting up a few automation's to run a force charge each month during the winter months when my batteries will never get fully charged by solar.