• General

  • Release 363 - Octopus Agile window 'hold charge' functionality

johalareewi So that command was issued as part of the 'disable charge slot', which had just passed.

Part of disabling a charge slot (whether a charge happened or not) is to reinstate discharge power (and charge power - gets reset too if it's less than max)

Not sure how we could decide not to, and know about other external ways that users might well interact with their Giv systems that we can't possibly all cater for?

GE app said battery was still paused even though it wasn't.

The GE app is quite prone to still having stale or cached values.

      admin So that command was issued as part of the 'disable charge slot', which had just passed.

      Ah. Didn't realide that still happened when a charge slot was skipped due to high SOC value.
      Still learning how this works.

          johalareewi It’s all good. I guess we saw it as something that wouldn’t cause any issues at that point. Most logical is to set those values back, as only occasionally you might mean them to be at 0.

            Hi, relatively new to this and seems a great product. One thing is during the 'gap' periods on agile my battery seems to be half on hold, half not, in that according to the giv portal it's trickling out c.300w with the rest of the load being met by the grid, rather than holding on whatever SOC it's got to in the previous charging window. Could you look into it? I'm tremendous-control. TVM

              I think some Giv inverters will allow small battery discharge even when Battery Discharge Power = 0. I have a Gen 1 HY3.6 inverter and it doesn't discharge at all but on the Giv community, others have said thier inverter allows around 300W to discharge. Would be interesting to see which inverters people have who are using the Agile Hold feature, and what happens.

              freakouthtesquares Looks like we do just send the 0 discharge power and the Giv response acknowledges that it has been set, see below - but your Giv HY5.0 inverter still discharges somewhat.

              As @johalareewi says, and I read similar things in Giv forums, some inverters are still discharging somewhat, despite discharge power being set to 0.

              Our alternative approach to set SOC target to current SOC had a similar effect, which is why we switched away from that.

              All in all, it's something that's unfortunately out of our control.

                Thanks both. Bit odd as it would maintain a steady SOC under the schedules I had set up via the portal, i.e. if charging window was 2-7am and it got to 100% SOC by 5am, it would remain there until 7am.

                Also FWIW my inverter is definitely HY3.6 but for some reason in the portal it is marked as HY5.0

                Gen 1 HY3.6 seem to come in different flavours depending on age. Also, there are reports on the Giv community that some HY3.6 are downrated HY5.0.
                My Gen 1 was very unhappy with the SOC method to prevent discharge, even though with SOC = 100% it behaves as you describe. It could also depend on battery firmware. SOC calcs are a bit hit and miss on my battery. :(

                  johalareewi johalareewi Ha, had not heard that re the downrating of HY5.0! Interesting. Mine is a Gen3. Very happy with it all told.

                  Thinking about it, my pre-WW schedule wasn't asking the battery to hold charge, it was asking it to charge for the whole window. So in the example above when it got to 100% at 5am it was then under instruction to charge until 7am, rather than hold. Perhaps that's why there's the difference?

                        Just had information from GE that the Battery Discharge Power setting is still in force during a power cut and will affect EPS. While setting it to zero for HOLD slots is working for me, if there were a power cut, the EPS wouldn't have any battery to use and the inverter etc. would shut down.

                        Thinking about how it works at the moment, an option to limit the Battery Discharge Power to 300W during a HOLD (or maybe a user defined value) would be ideal. There would be EPS power in the event of a power cut (this would prevent inverter shutdown and allow manual intervention to adjust the settings), and the GE battery would provide only enough power to run the house (during the HOLD) forcing the EV to charge from the grid.

                        freakouthtesquares it was asking it to charge for the whole window. So in the example above when it got to 100% at 5am it was then under instruction to charge until 7am, rather than hold. Perhaps that's why there's the difference?

                        When my inverter (like yours) reaches 100% SOC during a charge window, the inverter stops charging the battery and then runs grid only until the end of the charging period. Then the battery kicks back in. The original HOLD logic used this feature to drop the required SOC to the current SOC and assumed that the inverter would behave the same way but it was a bit wobbly. Probably because the battery SOC calcs kept changing the SOC. Setting Battery Discharge Power to zero seems to work better (unless your inverter won't go below 300W or there abouts).

                          Example of my battery SOC wobble. Around 6am, Agile HOLD in place so no battery discharge, but SOC flip-flops between 98% and 100%.