Solar PV Monitoring/Automation Thread

I have it permanently on a 0A charge from 2-5am, which means that grid is currently used regardless of the car charging.

I'd be happy with figuring out how to toggle it on and off in HA so it has the 0A charge only if the car is plugged in. I can handle the car part of the equation in the automation. Long term probably want to get into enabling battery charging during winter based on forecasted generation but I need to get more comfortable with this stuff first.

I've disabled the setting on the inverter and checked again - it's returning 49. So it is 49 off, 51 on for mine (at least in current config).

I've tried using the AppDaemon method posted earlier in the thread but it's not working. Boards won't let me post the log file, something about hacking the site 🤣 I've put it here - https://pastebin.com/KEPwWwuY

From your logs, it looks like your "inverter" app isn't loading, or at least it can't be called from ActionReceiver.

Did you modify anything in inverter.py? maybe when you set your own Inverter IP or Inverter Serial, put some bad formatting in so that the file is no longer valid python?

If you post a screenshot of the top 20 or so lines of code in your inverter.py, I can take a look.

Also, if you look in the "state" section of the AppDeamon UI, I'd guess it shows "Inverter" as not running (i.e. not "idle"). See mine below: all apps should be idle. In your case you should have "ActionReceiver" and "Inverter" as idle.

I looked at my generation today, and it hit zero pretty much an hour before sunset. Since today was dullish, I'm,m immediately thinking that the trigger for me for a sunset light might be solar hits zero +30 mins.

That would be a decent starting point anyway. I must remember to look at the clock and brightness around 21:10 tomorrow night.

It's a fixed offset, but based on a variable starting point. So if we had a solar eclipse during the afternoon, it should still work fine I would have thought.

It's interesting that my cease of generation is very close to your time, and obviously our sunset times are broadly similar

Thanks for this. I was away and back now so got to have a look into it again. Inverter is showing as terminated in AppDaemon. Here's a screenshot of inverter.py. I only changed the serial & IP.

EDIT: I restarted AppDaemon and it's coming back with compile_error for Inverter.

Have a look in the "error_log" in the AppDaemon UI, after an AD restart. It will show the reason why the Inverter app won't start. Post the log here and I can look too.

At a guess... if inverter.py hasn't changed at all (except for IP/Serial), then maybe its something that it depends on, like finding pysolarmanv5. Have you got "pysolarmanv5.py" in a folder called "utils", like it is in the zip file? Can you send a screenshot of your folder structure.

Whey hey, I see that Seplos BMS cell monitoring has landed - https://github.com/byte4geek/SEPLOS_MQTT

In case anyone else is doing this, what I missed in my automation was to have a condition for Plug Status. I'm glad it does seem to work otherwise though! I've amended the automation and added the plug status which in my case appears as "Charging" while the status is Boosting during a boost or scheduled charge.

Generation low and had to pull a fair bit from the battery yesterday for some clothes washing, so I set about an automation to charge during my 2-5am cheap rate. At 2am it set the timed charge on, adjusted the amps to 50A, and set it to charge until the battery SOC was above 79% (i.e. hit 80%), then set amps back to 0A, and switched off the timed charge. It worked as planned and charged until about 3.15 where it hit the 80%. Well impressed! Thanks again for all the help.

Next thing on the list is figuring out how I want to determine when to fill it from the grid. I have some ideas on how but will see.