Can anyone advise on what Giv-Energy have sent me?
They are offering me Axle + Givenergy Premium (remote access Automated tarif optimisation, History and reports,
Full cloud API Access For £0 a month.
Is this anything like it was before they went into administration.
At the moment i can not do much with my APP.
there is quite a bit to read on it but i do not understand it at all
Thank you
John
Why not ignore GivEnergy and sign up with Axle for free.
They will give you GivEnergy premium access for free
The guarantee a min income of £10/month.
You can sign up for fully managed (where they do full control). managed events (they warn you about 24 hrs in advance of event and take control of your battery for an hour. Pay you at £1/kwh) or self dispatch (where you have to self control the discharge during the event time. (I have HA and predbat and that does it automatically)
Thank you for your reply
Why do they take control of your battery, how can Axle pay £10 month and i pay £0.00p
You say you have HA and predbat, what is this.
sorry to be a nuisance.
John
I may get the description slightly wrong
Home Assistant is free software the runs on a Raspberry Pi (and some other devices I belive).
It has hundreds of integrations that you install to your HA and then set things to do what you want
It does not output to a monitor, but you view it on pc/phone/tablet over your local network and if you setup a
It communicates with other devices around your house and with some other apps you can set it up to connect from a remote location ( i use the HA app on my phone when I am not home).
https://www.home-assistant.io/
Predbat is a free app for HA that looks at your inverter and battery, your tariff, historic energy use, solar prediction and works out the best use of grid import/export, solar gain etc to minimise cost. It controls the inverter autmatically. There is also a cloud version (subscription) if you dont want to go down the HA route yourself.
https://predbat.com/
My HA is setup to talk to some wifi plugs in the house and control them. It talks to my room thermostats, and hopefully I will get a RAKO hub soon so it will talk to my house lighting system.
You can then build your own automations and dashboards for what you want
Maz
Axle is setup (i believe) to look at upcoming big electrical demands on the grid.
If they can take control of hundreds /thousands of batteries and use them to avoid firing up a power station, they are prepared to pay £1/kwhr of your export. Presumably they then get a much bigger payment from the energy companies.
I have only been on it for about 2 months, but they pay my £5.99/month for GE premium access as well.
So far I have had about £60 from them for export events to the grid
If running your own HA setup seems a bit daunting, you could subscribe to Wonder Watt like I do. Wonder Watt has inbuilt Axle support and reads their API directly. Wonder Watt automatically schedules your Axle Events and will either pause any exports prior to an Axle Event (so you have enough) or if you are running low, schedule a charge so that you can participate. It works like clockwork, I have been using Axle for 6 months and Wonder Watt for 15 months and wouldn't use anything else for scheduling. It works particularly well if you are subscribed to Axle's short notice events where you only get 2 hours notice before events.
You can get a 14 day free trial to see if it works for you. https://www.wonderwatt.com/
I only went down the HA route as I retired and son had left an old/unused PI lying around.
So it was free kit and something to do other than watching daytime TV.
I was up and running in half a day, and my background is not IT
I have been experimenting with HA for a while but stick with Wonder Watt as I value its ease of use and outstanding support. ( I notified them of an issue with my setup earlier today. Within an hour I had a response to say that the issue was their end and how to resolve it )
wrighar I would point out also that the Home Assistant Operating System will run on an old laptop or desktop if you have one hanging around. I put it on an ancient Toshiba that I hadn't used for years (bought a new battery) and it's been rock solid for the last 8 months. I'm not techy either and followed a youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfimVHCj5Mg
While I'm at it I followed this youtube video to put GivTCP on my shiny new home assistant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHSI4oTZyTI
SteveCook same here. Signed up for Axle on their “events” rather than fully managed option. Free access to GE premium and regular payments for using our excess solar throughout the summer. Check out VPP in a search engine. Axle seem to be growing steadily with ambitions in Europe and so far I am very impressed.
First Axle event this morning for me, only signed up on Monday. Inverter settings changed and then changed back without issue, exported about 1.4kWh because the battery was low. Nice to have GE Premium so I can monitor solar from out and about, and if there's £10/month min from Axle too then even better
Charged the battery last night ahead of this morning’s event. Simple task on the Beeb app to set and cancel those. Will wait and see what they get from my smart meter readings.
On the subject of free GE access you are giving away complete read/write api access to your inverter and whilst you have visibility of inverter write events you won’t see any for read events. And I would suggest that this approach is not in line with GDPR principles, especially transparency, purpose and minimisation of collection. We loose/give away enough pattern of life data without adding this to the mix.
