I have my fully charged 9.5KWh battery set to discharge at full rate (3.6kW) from 16:00 to 19:00. It initially starts discharging at full rate then drops to 1.78kW after a few minutes and stays at that rate until fully discharged. I've checked that the rate is not throttled on the portal and is set to 100%. Am I missing something here?
Is the battery outside? Cold weather?
TX200 Possibly - no problem if this is the case. If the battery throttles itself due to cold weather then no need to pursue this further. However the battery temp is showing 16*C on the portal. I'm trying to contact the support team to get this confirmed.
TX200 Is the battery outside? Cold weather?
I thought low temperature only affected charging power? Didn't think discharge power was affected. But I'm really up to date with all these changes.
Discharge limiting is normally a sign of cell imbalance. If you have an android phone I'd get the Android Inverter app and see what's going on.
(Charge limiting is normally the cold however)
hoggy Just an FYI for others reading this thread - not relevent for the OP, but the Inverter App (which I use) does not (currently?) do this for high-voltage (such as AIO) or three phase systems.
Lake I had a problem like this with my battery. It would only charge and discharge at 1.77kW. This turned out to be a faulty cell within the battery. It was replaced by Giv under warranty. Does your battery charge at 3.6kW? If possible I would get your installer to phone Giv and ask them to check the battery.
NormC Hi, yes I'm beginning to suspect I have a faulty battery. Discharge has now dropped to 850kW which seems to be 50% step reductions each time. I've raised a ticket with Octopus and also reached out to GE.
hoggy Hi, yes I'm beginning to think this is the case - the discharge rate has now dropped again a further 50% to 850kW. Unfortunately I'm not on Android so am unable to confirm, but I've raised a support ticket with Octopus (10 day wait apparently). I'll raise hell until this is sorted out - the system has only been in 4 months!
Personally at this age, I’d be leaning on octopus to replace it with something they currently install 😉
Lake
Mines almost exactly the same. It starts quite high then drops to 1.7kw output. I put it down to colder weather it's in the garage at about 9 c at the moment. Getting worried now.
kram The thought did cross my mind! Funny, I was speaker to the installer whilst they were putting the system in and he said Octopus have changed to a different set-up and mine was one of the last - basically using up stock. Oh great!
hoggy (Charge limiting is normally the cold however)
Depends where the SoC is - at least on the 9.5kWh batteries.
The 40-60% region is where I've seen it rate limiting (1.7kW) on charge when there's a deviation of >35mV (maybe 40mV) between cells. Its quite a brief period (15-20 minutes) and if users are only utilising the app/portal then its easily missed. Definitely not related to cold as it happened to me last summer over the course of a couple of weeks.
A few charge/discharge cycles at 900W pulled the cells back into alignment enough to prevent this happening again but I suspect I'm going to have to repeat that fairly soon - somewhere around the 6 month mark from when last done.
FWIW I see roughly 30-40% increase in cell misalignment in the 40-60% SoC region when doing a charge from flat to full. ie a 24mV misalignment becomes a 30mV+ misalignment.
v3015 battery f/w, 191/193 G1 f/w.
If there’s a problem in the first six months, it’s up to the supplier to prove it wasn’t there.
Sounds like the battery setup provided isn’t fit for purpose , so contact the installer/supplier (octopus) and tell them this…
Vestas That’s interesting! So you cured the issue by carrying out a few full charge / discharge cycles?
The reason I have finally awoken to this problem is because I recently decided to take the system off ECO to allow some battery power to be ‘left in the tank’ for the 16:00-19:00 peak period. Prior to that on ECO, there so so much going on that it was difficult to see, and the battery was always fully discharged by 16:00. This could have been a problem from day 1 but gone unnoticed.
kram I have a ticket raised with Octopus. 10 day delay in response times due to deluge in tickets being raised……I wonder why 😒
Lake If you read my post carefully you'll see its unlikely to relate to your problem, I was merely saying to @hoggy that charge limiting does happen with cell misalignment but its often missed as its short duration. I only noticed it last year because I use HA/GivTCP rather than the app/portal.
I fully agree with @kram - if its less than 6 months then demand Octopus put in a system they currently install/support. They binned GE as a supplier last July/August(ish) due to (apparently) unreliable batteries and lack of meaningful support from GE so when they put your system in they knew perfectly well what issues you would potentially face.
Get it taken out and replaced with something more reliable.
If you paid anything by credit card, even the deposit raise it with them before the 6 month period too. 👍
kram Yes, I may end up having to pursue this avenue ultimately.
The bill was paid via their normal billing system through bank transfer, not sure about the deposit maybe PayPal.
I suspect this road will be long and hard, and may end up in the hands of solicitors.
I’d be straight with octopus and clear about what you’d call an acceptable solution. They have been reasonable in my dealings, but I’ve not purchased solar from them.
hoggy
hi
Givebat9.5 + Gen3 5kw inverter installed June 2024
I think I might be experiencing similar issues. Though mine seemed to start when I installed firmware 3017 last week.
since then much of the time I seem to be limited to about half output i.e 1.7kw. I have no idea why.
battery is in a garage but times it is throttled do not seem any colder than the times the output seems higher.
State of charge might be an issue. It seems as if the output is being throttled when the SoC is below about 80%
I am an android user what is the "inverter app" that was being referred to and what will it tell me?
Any other advice appreciated.
Jason71 I am an android user what is the "inverter app" that was being referred to and what will it tell me?
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.rubikcube.invertermonitor
Try it and see. Free to download, nothing to lose.
Jason71 there have been other people reporting this issue, seems there was something wrong with the inverter and it needed to be reset by givenergy support
The temperature related throttling applies AFAIK only to charging, discharging should still be at full rate regardless of temperature (well, the battery has to be above -10 degrees I think)
yeah it definitely does not seem to be temperature related. times when its low are no different temp wise to when the output is higher. the key factor definitely seems to be state of charge.
I will look to contact support.
thanks
So I downloaded the app. I assume it is the individual Cell voltages that is the main thing of interest?
under low load they all seem reasonably similar except 13 seems to be lower than the average by maybe 20mv
BUT
when the battery is discharging at a high rate that disparity jumps to something like 200mv which I understand is quite a lot. Seems to be the same 70% and 25% state of charge and probably everything else
Is there anything that can be done to balance the pack or is this a major issue?
Jason71 Needs an engineer visit IMHO. How does cell 13 look when on full rate charge?
Best of luck with that - do let us know how it goes.
I will have to check that. Am usually asleep when that is happening :o)
its sunny today so it is currently fully charged and 13 is sitting at 3.351 while the others are at 3.346-3.351. so nothing standing out when charged.
What is the best way to contact support. I sent a message via:https://givenergy.co.uk/end-user-support/ a couple of days ago but have heard nothing. do you know how long they typically take?
Do you think I would be better off speaking to my installer? its a random local company not one of the big boys.
but would
Jason71 Take a look at Trustpilot (recent reviews filter) and see what's being said there is probably the best bet - GE are firefighting over there as their rating plummets.
Last time I looked GE claimed to have customer phoneline open again but the website contradicts that as did a couple of reviews.
I'd be using the installer to get in touch were I you. The installation is under a year old so they should be the ones you chase.
Similar to what I had last year on cell 5 and 13.
It was a slightly loose bus bar between the packs.
15mins with the engineer and his insulated spanner and it was all fixed.
[unknown]
A somewhat belated update.
After being ignored by Givenergy for a while I got my installer to contact them. They had a meaningless conversation and agreed It was just me not understanding the recent charging changes in 3018. Even though I had said nothing about charging and provided a detailed description of the DISCHARGE issues I was having. So eventually I managed to speak to someone who was not an idiot and he immediately agreed that there was an issue. He updated me to 3019 and that seems to have fixed the issue. The cell imbalance I mentioned also seems to have largely dissipated.
So at the moment all good.
Now I just need to figure out why all my lights flicker constantly while running in EPS mode.....
[unknown] I had the same issue with flickering lights. Grid data on the portal showed wild fluctuations, but the DNO checked grid voltage for a week and found no issues. None of my neighbours were affected. I suspected EPS, as the problem coincided with 0s switchover being activated. I asked GE to switch off 0s and since then I’ve had no problems.
Flickering stuff on EPS - tucked away in the release notes of the latest firmwares is the rather cryptic:
"Fixed the relay issue for rare grid conditions causing incorrect EPS operation" which would perhaps be related to your symptoms?
[unknown] Yes, I saw that, it is a bit vague isn’t it!