Observations on the Firmware update process

So Yesterday I took the final decision to upgrade my battery and inverter firmware and make a great leap forward.

GE have improved the process and it is nice to see an information bar detailing the different steps as it works through the process. So 10/10 for that improvement from the old days..

The Inverter went from DO.535 - AO.535 to D0.212-A0.212 and that took around 10 minutes.

My two Batteries on 3015 were having nothing to do with the new firmware and the process got stuck at 90% for around a couple of hours before I got an update on the web page allowing me to down load the firmware file.

Again this is a great new tweak (bar the two hour wait) and it does show that even when the process fails it has a graceful state and proper message. Pity it could not be a bit faster.

While waiting for the message to update I decided to try the new WhatsApp support process.

That was less than ideal as once I had jumped through some hoops to enter my details I just got a message saying everyone busy and try again later. 0/10 for that!! How hard is it to implement a support system where you get a ticket and get a ping when someone is available. Barclays do it but I guess they have deeper IT £ pockets..

Anyway I have done the USB update a few times now so I got the file they allowed me to download and I placed that on the two batteries fairly swiftly. So all good batteries are now on 3020 from 3015.

What is somewhat annoying is that you have two fields showing Last Update Time and Last Software Update but these remain blank!! So not sure why these have never been filled in. Perhaps too hard to stamp them on the data base during the process. 😉

It does now seem that ECO mode behaviour has been changed. You used to have to switch eco mode off to use the Charge and Discharge Time slots. This seems to be no longer the case and I had things set up to just toggle Eco mode On and Off to discharge and it just happened even with Eco mode on. Not sure when they tweaked that?

Last night I went to kick off a schedule recalibration and that has been tweaked as well!! Now you can't set that for the same day it says it is now limited to the day ahead? So rather than do something in haste I thought I had better check if anyone else has noticed that tweak? So I presume if I set it today the time I choose will be for Saturday?

M_J Now you can't set that for the same day it says it is now limited to the day ahead?

I think it means the opposite to what you think. I.e as in that you can only set it to start in the next 24hours. I set one going on Sunday at 4pm to start at 21:00 and it worked fine.

Thanks

PaDav6 ahhh my bad. Ok will give it a go tonight.

Thanks 👍

Yep I had misinterpreted the text and the Re Calibration has just ended.

I was expecting yet more loss of capacity yet the Master Battery 5.2 has jumped from 62Ah to 81Ah but the slave 2.6 has dropped from 47Ah to 45Ah

Master at 1583 Cycles Installed Jan 2022 - So now 3 years old
Slave at 793 Cycles Installed Nov 2023 - So coming up to 2 years old

I forgot to ensure that my charge percentage was greater than 1 which I had forgotten I had changed yesterday. Dohh so the recalibration took a tad longer than expected...

Just noticed that I got three error messages during the process. If you want to see the errors you need to get the Inverter Monitor App as GE hides them from you.

BMS Voltage Low 44.52V at 03:18
Battery Current Short Circuit at 03:28
BMS Voltage High 56.75v at 09:43

The short circuit one does not sound good.

ohh well shall see how things go this next week...

M_J Don't pay too much attention to battery capacity readings after a calibration as they are imprecise at best. They go up or down by quite a margin from one calibration to the next with seemingly little rhyme or reason. The only thing I have noted is that, in general, the lower the charge rate used during calibration the higher will be the reported battery capacity. If you have a mind to, your best chance of raising the reported battery capacity is to set a very low battery charge rate and wait the correspondingly long time for the calibration to finish. I have run calibrations that have taken over two days to complete!