Unable to control GivEnergy battery

It has been a week since a 22kWh battery and 3-phase controller (Gen 3; firmware ZAAA070707 ) have been installed. I’m really struggling with controlling the battery. So far, the only thing it does well is use the solar energy.

There is also an EV in the house which can drain the battery in 2 hours. Because of this I want to pause discharging of the battery when the EV is being charged. In the winter I want to charge the GE battery when the prices are low.

I have found how to charge the battery using a timeslot, but stopping the discharge is not straightforward.

To make it worse, the battery doesn’t listen to GivTCP (ver. 3.1.2) half of the time (most settings do nothing) and even the app regularly refuses to work and gives an error message. Only the cloud portal is working as expected (inverter is connecting through wired ethernet with 0 dropped frames)

Does anyone have an idea how to control the battery properly? Most of the documentation I can find seems not to be applicable to my inverter.

RG which tariff are you on? Do you have an export tariff set up? Simplest strategy if you have the latter is to charge battery overnight all year, and export solar. Charging automatically inhibits discharge.

DD Dynamic. Exporting solar brings very little. The ev carger has a load balancer. Is the battery charge is already running, the ev charger won’t kick in. If the heatpump engages both battery and ev will scale back. The one who engages charging first after will have priority.

RG There is also an EV in the house which can drain the battery in 2 hours. Because of this I want to pause discharging of the battery when the EV is being charged

Your electrician should be able to arrange the EV charger and inverter connection & CT clamps so that the inverter doesn't "see" the EV load and thus doesn't discharge the batteries into the EV

But as @DD says the simplest solution is to just set a timed charge overnight when you want to charge the EV.

On the issues with GivTCP, when you change a GivTCP control do you see the command being repeated in the GivTCP log (with no errors) - indicating that its been written successfully to the inverter?
You should then see that local change to the inverter being repeated in the GivEnergy portal remote control log as a 'remote change detected'

I know there are others that have been getting GivTCP to work with the 3 phase inverters. Its not perfect but they seem to be working OK-ish.

RG Dynamic.
Agile ?
i'm not sure what sort of feature set the 3ph model has - different versions seem to come with different sunsets.
One way to inhibit discharge is to configure a timed charge with a low target SoC. Could use longer charging period than needed, and once soc is reached, battery will idle. Similarly, a timed export with a high SoC limit.
Hiding EV from GE might mess up the load-limiting stuff?

geoffreycoan My first thought about rewiring was "that is unsafe", but it is not. Battery will just take precedence over de EV when charging.

Yes, the GivTCP log reports successes in the setting of parameters, but they are not present (success or error) in the log on givenergy.cloud.

RG is the load-limiting all-or-nothing, or will the devices share power. Eg if battery is charging at 1kW, does EV stop charging completely, or just reduce by 1kW ?

DD The load limiting is all or nothing. The car stops charging when the total load threatens to exceed the 3x25A connection.

I have tested all GivTCP controls and found that only the scheduling controls work reliably. So to pause the battery I define a 00:00 - 23:59 charging slot and the current SOC as target. (Which kind of mirrors the controls available at givenergy.cloud).

As @geoffreycoan suggested I’ve also contacted the electrician for an offer to change the work he has done.

To close this topic; this has been solved. The electrician rewired the installation and now the EV charger is invisible to the battery.

I did have to sketch it out to the electrician though, he never saw the wiring like this before. So take care when talking to the electrician, he/she might not understand what you are aiming for, but as soon as you put it to paper it becomes clear.

The way to ask for it is

Split the tails at a Henley Block (after the meter)

Send one set of tails to the new EV consumer unit.

Send the other set of tails to the household circuit board.

Done.

TX200 It will depend a lot on how your existing fusebox and henley blocks are wired up.

I have Henley blocks after my meter tails that split the supply to the changeover switch for the EPS consumer unit, the inverters, the ASHP, a ‘high load’ consumer unit and the cable to the extension fusebox.

At the moment my CT clamps are straight after the meter before the Henley block.

I would need new Henley blocks inserting before the current one to split into an EV charger and ‘everything else’ and move the CT clamps onto the ‘everything else’ feed to the existing Henley block.

Did see a suggestion that a similar approach could be taken to the two inverters, split the feed for them and place the CT clamps so the second inverter can’t see the load from the first one to eliminate cross charging. In my case this might require quite a bit of rewiring but worth considering