GivEnergy

Another update that has not addressed the timed discharge dumping the battery storage to grid. Eco mode randomly turning on and off dumping battery storage to grid. Please sort it.

Could accept the app limitations but inexcusable that it still can’t connect locally with both the inverter and the router less than 10 feet away

Update for 2024: So having used this for a year have had to reduce it from 2 stars to 1! The app has become significantly more unstable over the last year or so. Can only assume their app development and coding department spend all their colouring in as they clearly don’t put any effort into IT! Old review from 2023: Like others have commented this app often struggles to find the inverter on the local network. Furthermore, we ended up with GivEnergy as our solar installer (Octopus Energy) uses them; however GivEnergy is an absolute con of a company! Have any issues with the app, your inverter; your battery? Forget it, zero help from support, they already have your money so don’t care in the slightest.

June 2024 - Plenty of updates but not much fixed. Now we are three years into the Matter smart protocol, any chance GivEnergy will make its kit comply so we can control it with HomeKit? March 2024 - Be careful! Just found out that resetting the battery to default in the app DOES NOT reset charge time 2,3,4, etc set on the Web interface. A good looking app but falls far short of the Web interface. On the Web, you can set 8+ charging windows which is ideal for the Octopus Agile tariff. The app offers one charging schedule. There is still much to be done but if the app doesn’t develop, the GivTCP integration in Home Assistant could well be the answer. For the future, it would be ideal for the app to coordinate with the Agile tariff, so we could set a maximum cost per kWh and the app automatically charge the battery accordingly. Not sure what advantage the Carbon Intensity icon gives? If it was the home carbon intensity it would be useful but simply telling us what the grid is doing is meaningless and beyond our control. The Carbon API is also a significant cause of app crashes, so perhaps just ditch it?

Things like estimated charge time on battery or time left on battery rather than just a %

The app is pretty poor. It’s unreliable. Features aren’t great, and that’s before more “advanced” functionality is even mentioned. Such as: - Widgets - Notifications - Shortcuts

Writing this on 5th April. On 1st April all the import/export tariff costings reverted to zero on the dashboard. Oddly, the KWh readings remained. The system is now ‘catching up’ and costs/income are showing for today/yesterday but have yet to reach up to ‘past 7 days’ and beyond. Do the developers have any explanation? Edit 22nd April - I meant to say: Do the developers have an explanation for the loss of cost data?

Really happy that I can now use this app again on my old iPad as an in home display in the kitchen - it no longer crashes on startup.

We have had this system for a year now and I’m really disappointed with the lack of intelligence for this system. In order to maximise income and using and exporting clean energy to the grid, it requires multiple inputs per day, and neglecting to do this can result in an empty battery. There is no way to set any conditional schedules, in fact, it is only possible to set one schedule at a time, and you have to turn it on and off manually! This means it’s impossible to: -Charge the battery when the price of energy is below a certain threshold. -Simply discharge to the grid at peak times and make sure there is enough left for the evening - you have to do this all manually. -set more than one schedule for charge and discharge, with percentage/price limits. -top up the battery during the day to a percentage, without it then xporting solar input -allow the system to manage itself! Other basic issues include a graph that, when set to show the whole day and refreshed, only shows the first hour of the day, requiring the graph range to be changed manually again… this has been an issue for nearly a year. And once you set a percentage for discharge schedules, this changes it for the whole system (so I can set it to export to 50%, but the house then won’t use power below this point either!!!) My £300 Tado heating system is more intelligent than this, and we invested about £8k. Wish I’d waited and gone with Tesla Power-wall. Come on guys, get yourselves some engineers that have experience in interface design, this could be such a great system.

March 2024 - Be careful! Just found out that resetting the battery to default in the app DOES NOT reset charge time 2,3,4, etc set on the Web interface. A good looking app but falls far short of the Web interface. On the Web, you can set 8+ charging windows which is ideal for the Octopus Agile tariff. The app offers one charging schedule. There is still much to be done but if the app doesn’t develop, the GivTCP integration in Home Assistant could well be the answer. For the future, it would be ideal for the app to coordinate with the Agile tariff, so we could set a maximum cost per kWh and the app automatically charge the battery accordingly. Not sure what advantage the Carbon Intensity icon gives? If it was the home carbon intensity it would be useful but simply telling us what the grid is doing is meaningless and beyond our control. The Carbon API is also a significant cause of app crashes, so perhaps just ditch it?