Givenergy demise

Howdy ​@Hazy ,

That… Is a good question! I can actually go one better and ask the Forum Moderators to see if they can reach the right teams. I’ll fling this over to them right now and they’ll hopefully stop by soon.

Bear with us in the meantime! But feel free to chat here about it in the meantime - we’re pretty chill about that and we love a good discussion.

​@Hazy I've been tracking this in another forum and there will be a procedure with the administrators to see if the company can be salvaged thus avoiding the need to take any particular action with other parties. This is more about the process rather than having any first hand information. As far as I know it is only part of the company or group that is affected. The thread on the other forum is here which you might know about.

https://www.speakev.com/threads/givenergy-uk-call-in-administrators.196151/?post_id=3901529#post-3901529

I hope it works out well for you and the other customers.

Peter

I have a GivEnergy All-In-One battery which is working fine (🤞🏻) so I’ve been looking through some of the reassuring videos on YouTube. I have an email today from the GivEnergy’s software people who are keeping the basic parts of their systems free but starting a subscription service (at £4.99 p month) for the more advanced features which involve the cloud services. I would like to be able to look up the historical data from my system so I’m planning to pay. It seems fair enough.

Hey ​@Hazy 

Great question and one that is still very much up in the air whilst we, and the industry, see what happens with the GivEnergy hardware side of the business. 

I can see both ​@Peter E & ​@juliamc have given some great insight that display some of the possibilities for customers at this very moment. 

We’ll be more than happy to post more about this once we get an understanding of where responsibility lies so customers can make sure they know where to go for any support they need. 

If you have any further questions, do let us know 😀

Just as an additional comment if the GivEnergy servers become unavailable for any reason you can revert to a local ‘server’ (with remote access) using Home Assistant. I’ve just had a quick look and this particular link seems to be helpful in explaining what you need to do.

https://community-beta.givenergy.cloud/t/home-assistant-software/775

Now, I know you probably didn’t want to roll your sleeves up that far but I’ve put this on here to say that losing the GivEnergy servers is not the end of the road. Far from it. I will say that if the GE servers go Tango Uniform then I’ll be back on here (hopefully with my trusty colleagues) to give a much help as I can (I’m not a HA user myself) to support customers. I might even go for HA myself as an experiment as I have smart plugs that I want to unhitch from the Tapo servers at some point but still have remote access.

Peter

Speak to the Geek has just posted (on his YouTube channel) a very clear tutorial explaining how to set up Home Assistant to connect to the GivEnergy units. 
 

Tango Uniform 🤭

Also on GE forum seeking answers. Not sure that the Home Assistant plus TCP and Raspberry Pi will be a route taken by many. My programming days are long past and it is easy to get in too deep. My query is more about the OVO Charge angle. I have a Hypervolt EV charger and subscribe to the plan that allows me to charge the equivalent of about 700 miles on a monthly basis. Does anyone here know wether OVO pays access to the GE Cloud or is it direct to car/charger?

It sounds like OVO has direct control to your Hypervolt EV charger. OVO don't control charging through other tech. Not even sure that would be possible. Depending on the make/model you can also control charging direct to car.

OVO used to have a home battery control add on but they no longer do that. Having an EV, solar and battery can create undesirable interactions between the tech. It is incredibly difficult for most people to understand how to set up the options on each app to prevent issues. Each bit of kit can require its own current monitoring clamps and not every electrician knows where to place them correctly.

I can understand not wishing to get involved in Home Assistant. For a lot of people that would be a step too far.

Peter 

GivEnergy doesn’t seem to own Hypervolt - it’s actually owned by an individual - Flavian Alexandru from Romania according to Companies House.

That’s actually a good thing - Romania is the EU tech and cybersecurity powerhouse and companies like Bitdefender are founded/headquartered there. Romanians are often said to be amazing engineers when it comes to tech stuff too. Probably explains why Hypervolt absolutely crushes it when it comes to making stuff just work.

I don’t see anything to suggest Hypervolt runs anything via GivEnergy infrastructure either - it seems they’re using their own setup which makes sense.

Has there been any progress on things like warranty/ maintenance of an OVO fitted Givenergy system?

I have an All in One system which is working perfectly and still on finance.  I wanted to know what the situation is re. maintenance/failure if/when Givenergy is liquidated. 

Unfortunately I’ve not seen anything recently. It’s unclear as to what will happen to GivEnergy at this stage.

If you do have a problem with the system though and GE goes pop, Section 75 might cover you: https://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/consumers/complaints-can-help/credit-borrowing-money/goods-services-bought-credit

​@mikes01666 You need to see what the Administrators do. It's possible that GE may get bailed out or bought by another company etc. As far as I'm aware there isn't anything you can do until a determination has been made as to the solvency of the company. I would say the warranty is only valid if the new company wish to honour it which sometimes happens. 

More advice here

https://thedailybrit.co.uk/here-are-consumer-rights-explained-when-companies-go-through-administration/

Peter 

Thanks for this ​@Peter E - we’ll be monitoring the situation closely, and will update everyone with any news whenever we can.