GivEnergy 4+

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?

This is one of those apps that means you have to disable auto app updates on your phone.

They release a new version each week because its Monday rather than because its ready. So each week you get a different set of bugs to try out, features come and go again. The trick seems to be to keep loading versions until you find one where the stuff thats important to you happens to be there and work, then be careful not to update again for a long time.

Last weeks is the one for me. Only the little battery charge status icon on the home screen is broken, showing empty all the time unless you just restarted the app. Since the charge is reported as a percentage next to it, this isn't a big deal.

It currently lacks some important functions of the web site. Like controlling when and how much charge to load from the grid each day. Thats one of those things the app used to do and is currently missing.

My favourite feature of the app is the ability to connect to your inverter directly and show updates every 10 seconds. Better than smart meters for a live view of where your money is going and to figure out how to reduce your energy use.

27 Jan
This update had fixed some previous issues - remember me feature on log in screen works. Tapping on icons now brings up the data related to the icon and an added feature of string graphs is back again, all good and much nicer graphics than old version. However, the data related to grid import and export is still way of accurate.

25 jan
The old version at least kept me logged in this update doesn’t remember my log in details, click on any icon and get a blank screen. When it does work the information about import/export never matches anywhere near what my smart meter says. The only accurate info is the amount the panels are generating and the level of my battery. But since most of the time the app doesn’t work even that data is useless.