Timed Charge randomly disabled

Hi all,
Had my GivEnergy GIV-HY3.6 inverter and 9.5kw battery for almost 2 years now and they work great. Battery charges overnight on the cheap tariff.

But recently I've woken up a few times to find the battery empty and the Timed Charge feature set to "disabled". I have to re-enable it and it seems to work fine the next night.

Nothing has changed recently, and the temperature is above 2C. I am on the GiveBack scheme, where givenergy control the discharge, but it seems to have happened randomly.

Any ideas?

Hi - I noticed yesterday evening/early this morning that the 'battery conditioning' had kicked in about 12.45am for about 10 mins, as the battery temperature had dropped below 2 degrees. However (and most annoyingly!) when it finished it reset the AC charge to 'disabled', and the Timed Charge (set to start at 1.00am) didn't start. Luckily I was still up and looking at it, so re-enabled the AC charge, and it started charging. I think for the next couple of nights I'm going to have a look at it c. 1.00am and check; after that the forecast is for warmer temperatures, so hopefully the 'conditioning' won't need to kick in again. HTH

You might want to check the inverter logs as well. An earlier post (sorry, can't remember who now) mentioned that the battery conditioning system rewrites the 1st slot on the Timed Charge schedule (again, very annoyingly!) and suggested setting your normal timed charge to the second or later slot. Looking at my logs from last night, the battery conditioning rewrote Slot 1 and (me pulling hair out, what's left of it) left it with the times it had set, so when I re-enabled AC discharge I had to also re-write Slot 1 back to 12.00am to 12.00am (ie 'off').

Ahhhhh nice! That explains it.
I did recently turn on the battery conditioning. It's actually just reset the timed charge again this morning, and I can see the temp dropped to 2C. The logs show the battery conditioning overwriting it.

My inverter is a little older and only seems to have the one slot, so I guess I'm gonna have to disable the battery conditioning. Never seen it drop below 2C tbh, so hopefully not an issue.

Good to hear that was the explanation, and sorry to hear you only have the one slot. I've just dropped a note to GE suggesting they modify the script for battery conditioning. It would be relatively easy (I think, at least) for the script to take a note of existing settings and restore them once it's finished its cycle...

If you have a newer inverter you can use slots 2+ for the intended charging time but older inverters with a single slot will not be able to use timed charging with winter battery conditioning unless you add it yourself just before the desired time. This isn't made clear in the help and is the reason I don't use this option.

I would also mention that it will set the charge/discharge values to the maximum available, overriding any existing ones you had set. I had my charging set to about 70% of maximum to ease the stress on the battery but this was also lost (set to 100%) by the WC option.

bunny
Ah - I hadn't noticed the charge/discharge values changing. I've added that to the note to GE. I'm not sure what platform they use for the script (JSON?), but it should be relatively easy to set a few variables to the user values and then copy them back in when it's done cycling (I was doing it with VBA 30 years ago...)

So for me it was the fact that Winter Battery Conditioning disabled AC charging - why did it need to do this? And it overwrote my overnight slot 1 charge period. I have moved my timed charge to slot 2 as suggested, but if it's going to disable charging and retain the peak time charge settings in slot 1 it's still nowhere near fit for purpose.

I did't turn on the Winter Battery Conditioning until yesterday (Sunday) but the 2 previous days were the really cold ones. The battery charged fine the first really cold night, but the second night it did't charge at all (it was showing as -1 degrees accorging to the logs) even though the grid took over the home supply as it normally does during the charging period. Is there an additional protection to prevent charging when the "battery" is reporting as being below 0 degrees?

CazT Is there an additional protection to prevent charging when the "battery" is reporting as being below 0 degrees?

If the battery cells are below 0 degrees then my understanding is that the BMS will simply prevent the battery from charging at all. It can discharge though, down to -10, but not charge

geoffreycoan
Thank you - that would explain the behaviour I have seen.