GivEnergy Scheduler May 26 – Solar #13

1. Introduction

GivEnergy Software (GE) made a major update to their mobile phone app on Tuesday 26th May 2026 and introduced a monthly subscription fee of £5. The promise for GE Premium is that the “new optimisation software can much more than offset the cost of the subscription for the majority of customers”. There is also an option to join the Axle Energy Virtual Power Plant (VPP), who will pay the monthly Premium fee, at least temporarily, in addition to the other financial incentives of their VPP programme:

Since 26 May I have been trying out each of these options; so far I have tried the new GE features and now I have signed up to Axle Energy VPP. This blog post covers the GE app; I plan to write up my experience with Axle Energy VPP in the coming weeks, after seeing a few energy events. Hopefully, these write ups of my experience will save effort for others. I did this exploration with app version V4.0.6.5902 on Android. At the time of write up (25June2026) the app had updated to V4.0.6.5907 and so I updated the write up and ask GE to comment…

…I had no reply but then v4.0.9.60011¹ appeared. I retested the issues that I had written up; good news is that many of these are now resolved and, for these fixed issues, I have moved their write up to an appendix at the end of this post.

Note: my experiments have been limited:

• Just one hardware set up: GE Hybrid Gen 3 inverter & 9.5kWh battery
• Just Android and Firefox browser on Windows
• Just one tariff: Octopus Flux
• My time, and willingness to lose money on bad scheduling!

Please do add comments below if you can add to this dataset, eg different or confirming results and other hardware/tariff combinations.

I currently use  Wonder Watt (WW) to schedule my battery, via the GE Cloud. I have Monitor for Android on hot standby in case the GE Cloud fails. These are my baselines for comparison; are any of these new GE options better?

1.1 Documentation

Before I start, a diversion on documentation. During e-mail discussion, GE stated in an e-mail to me a belief on software that “you should be able to operate it intuitively directly from the interface, that is, it is self-documenting.” This is certainly a laudable objective. GE are so confident in the new software being self-documenting that they have also stated to me that “we will not be writing a manual for our software“. I like their confidence. I consider myself an intelligent and technically competent person (Engineering degree, part of my career writing software), but I am a child of the 60’s, so while my brain is still functioning, it is somewhat the worse for wear and less in tune with the modern world than in years gone by…

…so these tests are partly a test of how intuitive the software is for my market segment (old blokes who invested part of their pension pot on a solar/battery system as an alternative to the FTSE 100 and the S&P 500).

2. Premium & Wonder Watt

My first experiment was to just pay for premium and allow it to run for a couple of weeks. One concern that I did have was that the paywall for access to the cloud API would cause issues for WW. I had have had no issues; WW has continued to work well in the new era of paid for GE cloud access.

3. ‘Connect Via Cloud Servers’ Off + Internet disconnected

I wanted to emulate what features of the GE App are available with the GE Cloud not working. So I unplugged my Wifi router from the external internet, ie devices on our home Wifi could not ‘talk to’ the cloud, but did have direct access to the GE inverter, via our home wifi. I tried the app on two phones my regular phone with a functioning EE SIM (I disabled the SIM in settings for this test) and my pink sparkly backup phone, without a functioning SIM, that has Monitor on hot standby..

In summary, this left two scheduling options that worked:

• Home Dashboard [manual 30min slot] Battery Schedule
• Direct Control (ie you directly access the inverters registers)

Below are some of the screens that would not function without the cloud:

I expected that the Smart Scheduler and the historical data graphs would not function without the cloud, but I had hoped (incorrectly) that the inverter settings (right) would work without cloud access.

Direct Control – see below for more details.

The 30min manual scheduler is easy to use and self explanatory. It sets up 30min slots for charge, discharge and battery pause using the inverter’s native scheduler. While I did schedule a few slots for buy and sell and proved the functionality at this level, I did not try out the scheduler ‘in anger’, over several days.

With v4.0.9.60011 of the app, both of my phones have the same behaviour; the VPN installed on my primary phone is off on trusted networks (ie at home) and no longer causes an issue for the latest version of the GE app (see Appendix for older versions issue).

So how does  the GE App compare to Monitor for Android as an emergency backup if the (GE) Cloud goes down?

GE App Pros:

• Familiar app graphic for current status – I prefer this to the Monitor for Android equivalent
• Direct access to the inverter registers – useful for debugging

GE App Cons:

• Relies on the Inverter’s native scheduler, so has the ‘disabled battery on lower SOC% limit’ bug. The impacts of this are:
  • Requires Seasonal adjustments to peak rate discharge schedule
  • And even so, sometimes results in disabled battery at peak demand, ie excess consumption at peak rate
  • ie less good scheduling, not ‘set and forget’ and lower return on investment
• No local data history (Monitor for Android has this, for the time period where it is connected to the inverter via wifi)
• No visibility of inverter power consumption (uniquely, Monitor for Android shows this)
• No obvious method of scheduling battery reserve %Limit for ECO
  • Android for Monitor has this feature and this would be useful in winter to reserve some battery for evening/peak rate
  • I saw in a user forum it reported that, what I call the disabled battery bug, can be used to replicate this – ingenious!
• Setting individual inverter registers in the GE app is more fiddly than editing the schedules on Monitor for Android

My view now is that I will keep Monitor for Android as my backup scheduler and also keep the GE App on the same dedicated phone as a debugging tool to complement Monitor for Android.

4. Internet Connected – ‘Connect Via Cloud Servers’ On

Here I am a little confused. These tests were all carried out with my primary phone, at home with the Wifi router connected to the Internet.

The Home Dashboard ‘connect via cloud servers’ button had little effect, other than enabling:

• use of the smart scheduler.
• National Grid Live Feed button on  the Home Dashboard
• Current earnings light bulb button on the Home Dashboard

Otherwise all the screens that did not work without the cloud (above) would now work and it did not seem to matter if the ‘connect via cloud servers’ button was off or on. It appears that, for all except these 3 features, the ‘connect via cloud servers’ button has no effect. I am not sure that this matters (unless you specifically want to test out life without the cloud, as I did in the previous section!)

With the cloud in place there are new features:

• The remote control  page on the browser/cloud view of the inverter and the mobile phone app Remote Control Logs page now show changes made to inverter settings from the GE App, in the ‘Remote Control History’  as Via ‘External Change detected’.

• From memory this did not happen previously and it does greatly help understanding of what is happening (eg if you are writing a blog post). This cannot happen if the inverter is not connected to the cloud, but when the connection is re-established remaining changes are shown.
• Inverter Settings now allows multiple charge/export slots to be scheduled (see image below). This is a much easier method of using the native inverter scheduler without the limitations of:
  • Previous app versions that only allowed one scheduled slot for charge/export
  • The Manual Battery Schedule on the Home Dashboard that is limited to 30min slots.
• Smart Scheduler – looks intriguing – more on this below
• Help -> Health check is potentially useful, we will see, but, in any case, reassuring to get a message ‘Our diagnostic check has not found any issues with your inverter’ (but font/background colour make this very hard to read).
• Help -> known issues. While a version of this  was previously available from a browser, it was rarely maintained. It does look like GE is maintaining this current version with, at least some of their known issues, and now it is more conveniently available in the app – this is fantastic:
  • For users: If I have an issue that I see is already reported and under investigation I can get on with life; much less friction for users
  • For GE: fewer duplicated issue reports and (I assume) much easier to respond to a user with ‘does your issue look like this one on the ‘known issues’ list – ie less work responding to customers so more time to resolve issues and develop the software.
  • I have already fixed my ‘Premium Subscription…’ issue based on the known issues list with no direct contact with GE – brilliant, a win-win – keep it up GE and, ideally, extend to all issues.
• Remote Control Logs: great to have this in the mobile app – very useful to understand unexpected behaviour (eg from an external scheduler like WW or the Axle VPP).
• Update Firmware: I guess that it is good to have this in the phone app; however, my understanding is that GE will now only provide limited support for firmware. I am currently at least one firmware version behind, but my experience of firmware upgrade is that the process is a little ‘flaky’ and I would rather not risk it unless there is a specific fix that I need/want in the new firmware version.
• Self-help videos – a collection of You Tube videos with (former) GE people giving trouble shooting tips. I think that the videos are old, but good to have them in an easily accessible place.

Otherwise the app seems much as before:

• Home Dashboard graphic on instantaneous use is easy to understand
• Power Graph – very useful as previously
• Energy Graph – very useful as previously
• Battery Graph – very useful as previously (& interesting to drill down to battery temperature etc)

5 Direct Control

Direct Control is broadly equivalent to the GivEnergy Cloud Remote Control (inverter>remote-control) and works well. The adjusted inverter parameters are shown in the browser cloud view and vice versa. So, if you really want to directly set the inverter parameters, the new GE app provides a good interface and it functions without the cloud.

The parameters each have a register number and that is (mostly) the sequence in which they are listed, so not quite the same as the browser/cloud view where they are grouped by function. With v4.0.9.60011 of the app the parameters looked to be the same as the browser view of the cloud and, in any case, look like they would be very helpful if the cloud were ever lost.

See the appendix A3 for some small anomalies that I spotted in the earlier version of the app.

6. Smart Scheduling

I struggled to make this work. I think that I did manage to get my Octopus Account registered in the app:

• I had few failed attempts and the failure was notified by the app
• Finally, tariff registration seemed to work – I got no error message, but there was no explicit confirmation of success
• What I did see in the (very small) graphic on my phone is a version of the Octopus Flux Tariff:
  • The ‘buy’/import rates look like they change at the correct times for Octopus Flux
  • The ‘buy’/import rates are now correct (previous app version they were ~10x too small – see Appendix)
  • The ‘sell’/export rates are all 0.0p/kWh

• The sign up process:
  • First you give some details like country and energy supplier – all fine
  • With UK and Octopus you are then asked for
    • Account number
    • MPAN
    • Meter Serial Number
    • API Key
  • I had two issues here:
    • MPAN: I have two MPANs, one for import and one for export, but I can only enter one in the GE app, so I entered the import assuming that this would give GE the ability to access my export as well. Perhaps this is the reason why no tariff rate is shown for export in the graph? I could not see a way to enter the export MPAN without overwriting the import MPAN.
    • The Octopus website has warnings that you should not share the API-key, but just use it for personal access to your account as it is equivalent to giving away your password (since running these experiments, I have updated the API Key as recommended by Octopus!)
  • Even with just one MPAN number I got the OK from the GE app (or at least the absence of an error).
• The load and solar graphs show the preceding 24hours and a forecast for the next 24hours:
  • The graphs are confusing having units of Watt hours (Wh, ie energy), but it is not clear over what time period. Assuming 30min time periods then x2 should give you Watts and it should look like the Power graph (just scaled by x0.5)
  • the preceding 24hours look very different to the Power and Energy Graphs in the app – shape and scale (even with the x2 factor for Power, to account for 30min timeslots)
  • The forecast for the next 24hours did not look at all like the met office forecast and the predicted load made no sense based on recent history

I only left the Smart Scheduler running for around 1 or 2hours on three occasions, all between 5am and 4pm, so that it could not cost me too much with poor scheduling. Neither tests showed any of the 30min slots change from green/’use’.

I don’t have confidence to leave the scheduler running for longer, I just think that it would cost too much given that it shows no inclination to schedule any exporting at peak periods. So I am left with questions:

• Have I incorrectly registered my Octopus Account?
• Have I made some other mistake in setting this up?
• Will more time running allow the Smart Scheduler to correct the tariff and power data that, I assume, are inputs to the Smart Scheduling algorithm
• If I could enter an export MPAN would export rates be reflected in the chart and would this enable the Smart Scheduler to function?
• What is the impact of 30min slot scheduling compared to other schedulers with 1minute increments?
• How does it predict our load: a retired couple who are not tied to a 9-5 working week?

7 Conclusions

First: the new app from GE has some great new features and, in my view, is a great step forward. It is also  refreshing to see renewed enthusiasm and customer focus from GE, with, I hope, a business model that is sustainable.

Having said that, I am sticking with WW and Monitor as backup if the GE Cloud goes down.

The new GE app does have some great new features that complement, rather than replace these.

The Smart Scheduler looks intriguing, but I could not get it to work. From what I did see of it functioning, it looks like work in progress as opposed to the finished article, but the issues might be down to me incorrectly using the app. If it were to function, would I use it in place of WW? The saving would be the ~£5/month subscription for WW, but I would need to have confidence that the Smart Scheduler was as good (or at least nearly as good) and that it would function well with Octopus Flux and Octopus Go/Intelligent Go. Some documentation (tariffs and algorithms) would reduce the time required to achieve confidence.

While I appreciate the new enthusiasm and customer focus of GE and the resulting bug fixes and app extensions, it is worth noting that what I really want is a good, robust app, with no (few) changes – I would like my solar/battery system to be something that I could just leave and do not want multiple tweaks and changes through the year, ie the same as I want for my other pension investments.

I am currently trialing the Axle VPP (I plan another post on this), but I will need to see a few ‘energy events’ to get a proper picture. Of particular interest to me is the interaction between WW and Axle when scheduling events.

I have notified GE of this post to get their feedback, in particular on the Smart Scheduler. I did this for the Wonder Watt and Monitor post and they quickly got back to me, but this was ahead of launching the new app and perhaps they are busier now with ‘real work’? If/when I do get their feedback then I will update this post.

Appendix A: v4.0.6.5907 issues resolved by v4.0.9.60011¹

A1: VPN issues

I discovered that my primary mobile phone was not a good platform for v4.0.6.5907 of this app, without the cloud (it works fine with the cloud). The reason seems to be my use of Norton VPN. Of course, any VPN would prevent local connection over our home wifi; however, I have VPN set to come on only on ‘untrusted’ networks, ie it is off at home. Using the same dedicated spare phone that I use for Monitor for Android, the local connection works as shown above. This phone does not leave our house and so does not need VPN installed at all. I did not test this exhaustively, so there could be other causes (eg phone type: Pixel 8a running Android v16 Vs Samsung Galaxay A21s running Android v12 – it was the newer Pixel phone that had the local connection issues).

Good News: v4.0.9.60011 looks to have fixed this.

A2: Smart Scheduler

It looks like the Smart Scheduler is now correctly reading my Octopus Import rate; with v4.0.6.5907 the ‘buy’/import rates were incorrect (approx. 10x too small):

A3: Direct Control

I did find  a small number of anomalies in parameters between the phone app and the browser view of the cloud. It looks like these have been fixed in v4.0.9.60011:

There are also some intriguing greyed out parameters as well as some new active ones (eg “Force Off Grid register 331”) that seemed sensible to leave alone!

Footnotes

1. v4.0.9.60011 has an extra digit than previous version numbers – I am not sure if this is intentional on GE’s part? ↩︎