GivEnergy Energy Management System — Complete Configuration Guide
The GivEnergy EMS coordinates every energy flow in your home — when the battery charges, when it discharges, and when surplus energy is exported. Get it right and your system runs like clockwork. Get it wrong and you'll be importing peak-rate electricity with a full battery sitting doing nothing.
If your charge schedule isn't applying, the battery isn't discharging when expected, or your system keeps reverting to the wrong mode, we diagnose EMS configuration issues remotely — identifying schedule conflicts, timezone errors, and API overrides.
Book a Remote Diagnostic — from £75 → Settings changing themselves?Not affiliated with GivEnergy Ltd. Independent diagnosis and support.
What is the GivEnergy EMS?
The Energy Management System is the intelligence layer inside your GivEnergy inverter. It continuously monitors four data streams and uses them to decide what to do with every watt of power in your home.
Live output from your panels. The EMS prioritises using this locally before charging the battery or exporting.
Measured by CT clamps on the grid supply. The EMS uses this to detect whether you're importing or exporting and at what rate.
Real-time SOC from the BMS. The EMS uses this to apply target SOC limits during charge and discharge operations.
Calculated from generation and grid data. Used to ensure the battery response matches actual demand rather than over or under-supplying.
Your schedule tells the EMS when to run Timed Charge, Timed Discharge, or Timed Export. Between scheduled slots it falls back to Self-Consumption mode, using solar first and only drawing from the grid when needed.
How to access EMS settings
The portal provides the most complete view of all EMS options.
The app exposes the main scheduling options — sufficient for most users.
Setting up Timed Charge
Timed Charge instructs the battery to charge from the grid during your defined slot, regardless of solar availability. This is how you take advantage of cheap overnight electricity rates.
Configuration
Key rules
Setting up Timed Discharge
Timed Discharge forces the battery to supply the household during defined windows, displacing expensive peak-rate grid import. The target SOC sets the minimum the battery will discharge to before stopping.
Configuration
Important behaviour
Between 05:00–16:00 the battery retains 60% reserve — enough to power evening peak from battery rather than grid.
Setting up Timed Export
Timed Export pushes stored battery energy to the grid during high-value export windows. It overrides Timed Discharge and requires manual reset once the target is reached.
Timed Export does not automatically resume discharge
Once the battery reaches the Timed Export target SOC, the system stops exporting but does not automatically begin Timed Discharge. The battery will sit at whatever SOC it's at. You must either manually reset the export slot, or sequence a Timed Discharge slot immediately after the export window in your daily schedule. This is the most commonly misunderstood EMS behaviour.
The midnight rule
GivEnergy slots — charge, discharge, or export — must sit entirely within a single 24-hour period. No slot can span midnight. This is a firmware constraint, not a portal bug. It applies in both the app and the portal.
This is the most common reason batteries don't charge overnight
If someone set up your system and the overnight charging has "never quite worked," the midnight rule is usually why. Slots look fine in the interface but simply don't function when they cross 00:00. The fix is straightforward — split the slot at midnight. Check your current schedules and look for any that run from late evening through to early morning.
EMS best practice tips
For tariff selection and how to match your cheap window to the most financially beneficial schedule, see the tariff optimisation guide. For CT clamp issues causing the EMS to misread grid import/export, see the CT clamp direction guide.
GivEnergy EMS — common questions
Check in order: (1) does the slot cross midnight? Split it. (2) Is there an API connection (Octopus Intelligent, etc.) overriding it? Check Connected Apps in the portal. (3) Is the portal timezone set correctly? A BST/GMT mismatch shifts your schedule by an hour. (4) Is the CT clamp pointing the wrong direction? This causes the inverter to misread import as export and vice versa.
Target SOC is the battery level the EMS aims for during a Timed Charge, Discharge, or Export slot. In Timed Charge, charging stops when this level is reached. In Timed Discharge, discharging stops at this level and the system falls back to grid for remaining demand. Setting it to 4% in a discharge slot means the battery delivers nearly all its stored energy before stopping.
Timed Export overrides Timed Discharge, and once the export target SOC is reached, the system stops exporting but does not automatically start discharging. The battery stays at whatever level it reached. You need to either manually reset the export slot or ensure a Timed Discharge slot is scheduled to follow the export window in your daily schedule.
Yes — this is normal and recommended. A typical day has a Timed Charge slot during the cheap overnight window, one or two Timed Discharge slots covering morning and evening peaks, and Self-Consumption mode handling the daytime. The slots must not overlap. Timed Charge takes priority over Timed Discharge if they accidentally overlap.
EMS schedule not doing what it should?
We review GivEnergy EMS configuration remotely — checking schedules, API integrations, timezone, CT direction, and firmware to find the exact cause and get your system behaving as expected.