Mesh WiFi Issues

Long story short, my inverter (Hybrid Gen 2) regularly lost contact with the home WiFi despite very good signal. It would also randomly reconnect itself after being offline for days. We've had Eon out a few times and they either couldn't get it to connect or it would fail soon after.

Weirdly, the Nokia router would show the dongle as connected to the network with a MAC address visible and an allocated IP address, but the GivEnergy app wouldn't connect.

Eon engineer says they've had trouble with mesh WiFi networks, and todays solution was to create a separate 'Guest' 2.4ghz network on the router with the dongle being the only device connected - thus far it works.

Posted for the information of anyone else struggling with weird WiFi issues. I'm not aware if this is unique to Nokia mesh systems or other brands also.

I'm still convinced there's something in GivEnergy Comms firmware that makes it flakey with modern WiFi equipment.

DaveCole there’s quite a few post on this topic, but in brief the givenergy dongle only connects on the 2.4GHz network, it cannot connect on 5GHz. Most wifi routers and mesh networks broadcast the 5 and 2.4 with the same SSID and if a device tries to connect to 2.4 it will push them to the 5 network, which the givenergy inverter can’t use.
Creating a guest network is one fix or change the network SSID for the 2.4 network or to turn the 5GHz network off when you are connecting the inverter, that way it connects initially to the 2.4 an then works fine thereafter. Also if you have fast roaming you need to turn this off and ensure that security is WPA2, not WPA3 or higher.

I have a TPLink Mercusys mesh network and this is what I did to get my inverters to connect.