I have sent the suggested first letter via email and also copied in several senior people at GivEnergy after doing some research on contacts.

A couple of emails bounced back as they’re no longer with the company, but my thinking is that the more visibility this gets internally, the better.

Admin edit: Direct email addresses have been removed from this post. While we understand the intent was to be helpful, publishing named contact details falls into personally identifiable information, which we need to handle carefully as a platform. Members are encouraged to use official company contact channels or publicly available sources (such as Companies House or LinkedIn for example) to identify appropriate contacts.

@drei yes I too was pretty surprised when I found the email in my junk yesterday. I bought my system through EON in 2023 and I’m pretty sure the listed the cloud monitoring as part of the USP. I will have a dig around for the paperwork etc and get back to you.

Local access is not a serious substitute in this day and age, especially if you are away from home and need to monitor the system or change settings. Even then, local access is not full access. There are settings you still cannot view or change, so unless GivEnergy makes local control effectively 100% admin-level, it is not an equivalent replacement.

The biggest issue for me is smart tariffs. Access to smart-tariff optimisation was the main reason I chose GivEnergy in the first place. If that disappears behind a paywall, then the product is no longer doing what it was purchased for.

My system is still less than two years old. Without paid cloud access, I could lose updates, remote access, easy troubleshooting, and meaningful support. That is a huge reduction in functionality for a relatively new system. How exactly are faults meant to be diagnosed if remote assistance is no longer available? What happens in practice with warranty support if the system is no longer remotely monitored, updated, or properly optimised, including winter optimisation?

There are also very basic day-to-day issues. Schedules need adjusting, tariffs change, and even something as simple as keeping the system time correctly aligned for daylight saving matters if charging and discharge windows depend on timing.

I also experimented with GivTCP and Home Assistant. At first it looked promising, but in practice I found the Modbus integration unreliable. Home Assistant and GivTCP would often time out and need multiple resets to get going again. I still do not know whether that is a fault with my Modbus unit, but cloud access itself works fine. Even so, the local side was timing out every five minutes or so.

If this goes ahead, I will be looking at my options and considering a claim. At that point I would seriously consider replacing the battery and gateway with a Tesla system. Thankfully my setup uses SolarEdge inverters and the battery is separate, so in theory I may only need to replace the battery and gateway with minimum disruption.

In regards to "Especially a PV inverter, how will you access cloud in a blackout?". If the GivEnergy battery is doing its job properly, I should not be sitting in a blackout anyway, as it does full house bkacup. I also have 5G failover on my router, so internet access at home can remain available even if the main connection drops.

The only blackout that would then matter is one affecting GivEnergy’s own servers.

There is a trend these days of manufacturers attempting to screw over customers with mandatory cloud subscriptions.

One hilarious example is BMW's attempt at charging a monthly subscription just to enable the heated seats in the cars. I mean, people bought cars with heated seats installed, but in order for BMW to remotely flip a bit in the MCU to allow the heated seats to perform their function, they had to pay $18/month. Pretty stiff. The story doesn't say if they charge per-seat? Hey why not.

Another more tragic event is with French home automation company MyFox. People built their entire home automation with these products which offered a neat and easy to use web interface via a cloud server. Then the company was bought by much bigger player Somfy, who obviously told the customers "we're ending the service, fortunately we're selling a whole suite of products that can do exactly the same thing that your old perfectly functional installation used to do, all for the modest cost of throwing it all away and buying and installing everything all over again, and obviously it only works with our cloud servers so there's a monthly bill..."

This plague has also infected heat pumps recently.

Posted by: @drei

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Local access is not a serious substitute in this day and age, especially if you are away from home and need to monitor the system or change settings. Even then, local access is not full access. There are settings you still cannot view or change, so unless GivEnergy makes local control effectively 100% admin-level, it is not an equivalent replacement.

If you don't have root / full control, the device is not yours.

If "local access" does not allow full control, then it is purely cosmetic, in reality there is no local access.

If there is no local access to a device, then there is no access, period. It may "work" now, but at some point the servers will be unplugged, the company will go down, or it will be under subscription, or they will remove the feature.

In this case, the product does not provide local access, so it is unfit for purpose. The manufacturer should be sued out of business via class action, but then... you will lose cloud access...

If you have full control with local access and some guy already made a Home Assistant plugin for it that actually works, then you have remote access via HA, and you can do whatever you want with it, locally or remotely.

Posted by: @drei

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I also experimented with GivTCP and Home Assistant. At first it looked promising, but in practice I found the Modbus integration unreliable.

Most likely yes. In the github I linked, they mentioned they had to modify the modbus core library for it to work with the device, which means it probably uses some sort of non standard stuff to prevent people from controlling it locally. That is enough of a red flag to never buy the product. Also it has internet connection with remote updates, which means they can remove local access any time they want, which means there is no local access, which means there is no access.

Posted by: @drei

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In regards to "Especially a PV inverter, how will you access cloud in a blackout?". If the GivEnergy battery is doing its job properly, I should not be sitting in a blackout anyway, as it does full house bkacup. I also have 5G failover on my router, so internet access at home can remain available even if the main connection drops. The only blackout that would then matter is one affecting GivEnergy’s own servers.

Yeah, so in case of an actual blackout where you actually need backup, ie longer than the battery backup duration in the 5G towers... like will happen in a few months when we all run out of gas... then there will be no access.

If people buy stuff, manufacturers will make more of it. If people don't buy stuff, manufacturers will stop making the stuff.

In the end, if you buy that kind of stuff, you vote with your money in favor of this kind of predatory practice... I mean I may sound like a jerk saying that, but... it's true.

I sincerely wish you good luck suing them, they deserve it.

This is disappointing to find out as I had Givenergy HV batteries installed December 2025.

The situation sounds similar to my old company. Businesses integrate their software systems and business model into the likes of Amazon cloud, Azure etc and then they find they are basically held to ransom with hosting price increases with no way out. I would hazard a guess the hosting companies are trying to recoup some of the obscene costs AI is costing them 😔

From the email I received I got the impression Givenergy are going to improve local access to the system over the coming months. What that will look like is anyone's guess

What are Givenergy charging for the cloud access?

@drei great so you succeed in blocking Givenergy's plans with a legal case etc, what then?

The company goes bust and we are all left with hardware that will never get anymore software updates and we will have to hope the equipment does not fail before it's full life span thus causing a full replacement instead of the offending subsystem. On top of that no remote access anyway.

The business climate has changed and if it means me paying a modest subscription to help future proof my system then that is the way it has to be.

People are happy to pay subscriptions to the likes of Homely, I do not see any difference with this.

Regards

Posted by: @technogeek

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The business climate has changed and if it means me paying a modest subscription to help future proof my system then that is the way it has to be.

People are happy to pay subscriptions to the likes of Homely, I do not see any difference with this.

The question is, will it be enough to save them if they're haemorrhaging money as a business? 

Can someone please email me Givenergy's email with the subscription announcement: editor@renewableheatinghub.co.uk

@editor check your inbox

G

Got it. Thank you @gruff2001

This is the web page, similar announcement https://givenergy.com/paid-givenergy-tier-announced/  

They haven’t said how much they want to charge!