Inverter reporting to be offline

mrtnbcky

I realised that my timed export scheduled for 16:00 today had not happened, and on checking the logs saw it reported that my inverter was offline.

As I had a few minutes to spare before the 18:30 slot, I set up a discharge for then, but again it's reported that I was offline, despite ensuring that I was checking the connection to the inverter via the GE app from 18:20 - 18:30.

Is this a known issue, and how do I fix it please?

buoyant-media

mrtnbcky

mrtnbcky update - I set an export window to start at 19:00 and this has happened, with no other intervention. Unfortunate glitch?

If an 'inverter offline' response is received, is it possible to re-try the instruction? I've missed out on exporting 9kWh of >30p electricty today!

admin

mrtnbcky Yeah, we already retry 3 times. Within a minute or so to account for temporary glitches. We can't cater for inverters being offline for 5 mins or more really.

Few others with Giv have had the same in the past but either went wired or set up a close Wifi access point. I'm sure people will chip in with their suggestions.

mrtnbcky

admin mesh WiFi network with AP in direct line of sight about 4m away from the GE dongle.

I was on the GE app (deliberately using mobile data not local) monitoring things live so unlikely to be any connectivity issues, but I will keep an eye on it

WindyMiller

mrtnbcky Completely anecdotal but I get inverter offline problems sometimes even with a very strong wifi signal. My suspicion falls on the Givenergy dongle being in effect a single threaded device capable of dealing with only one command string at a time. I have several monitors throughout the house polling the inverter for updates and I think the inverter occasionally can't support all the requests, gets lost, and then appears offline. It seems to take some time to sort itself out. I moved my Wifi point closer initially without improvement but also noticed that no other adjacent Wifi equipment (Solar inverter, Distribution Board monitor) went offline at the same time as the inverter reported offline. So I think the Givenergy inverter Wifi is just a flakey implementation.

miffy

mrtnbcky Hiya. I've seen people on the FB groups with mesh wifi report that the inverter dongle doesn't play nicely with it. We don't use mesh, so I can't confirm that. We do, however, have a dedicated 2.4 Gb wifi network set up on our router just for the inverter.

We have a GivEnergy Gen 2 hybrid inverter, which came with a tiny 3.5" aerial. I replaced that with a 12" omnidirectional aerial (bought from Amazon), and our wifi connection dramatically improved in reliability. It's not perfect, but a lot better.