Solar PV Monitoring/Automation Thread

What you want to do with the data will determine how you want to obtain and process that data. I read every page in this thread too. Jonathan's code was a great introduction but I soon found the Solarman integration for Home Assistant (https://github.com/StephanJoubert/home_assistant_solarman), which meant I didn't have to create bespoke software thus saving a lot of time.

Rather than reinventing the wheel, the Solarman integration for Home Assistant allows me to interrogate my system away from the inverter, which is now integrated with home energy automations.

If you can write code the I'm sure setting up Home Assistant will be an easy task for you.

In my case I keep taking the met.ie forecast on the hour every hour - albeit they don't actually change every hour. More like 4 hrs, but the reason I do it is if for some reason they change the time that they update at (11pm, 3am, 7am, etc currently), then I don't have to do anything with my code.

I then take the latest forecast that I have at 5am (usually this is the one at 3am), and then compute my SOC charge level to put into the battery. With 8.2Kwhr storage and a charge rate of 2.6Kw, 5%->100% takes about 3 hrs, so I'm done by day time rates at 9am in the summer easily. Now if the forecast was crap, and at 5am decided to go to 100% and then magically it improved and say I needed 60% at 7am, if I'm above that level then I abort.

Basically I keep it as late as I can in the night time rate to start charging but leave enough time so that I can go from 5%->100% if needed.

I haven't done a "proper" analysis - although I would wonder why you would want to? The way I look at it, is that the most recent forecast (should) always be the most accurate as the window in time that it's forecasting for is closest - so in theory it should be more accurate, right?

I guess there would be random days where the 12am forecast turned out to be more accurate than the 3am, but since forecasting is effectively a game of probabilities, your odds are stacked better with the latest forecast. I do however log my predicitons and time, for example, here is todays log.

I stop updating todays predictions after 6am. The logic being that the sun is up, so the "solar radiation" for the rest of the day is actually dropping (as the sun moves across the sky during the day)

Tomorrow is interesting though. You can see that originally it had 35.05Kwh, then at 4am it upgraded it to 36.32Kwh and then 11am downgraded it etc. Basically as the day went on the forecast for tomorrow changed from Met Eireann.

Either way, it looks pretty good for tomorrow.

Does anyone have experience of migrating Home Assistant to another machine?

I put HA on an old laptop just to get it running but after replacing my desktop with a NUC and being very impressed (for my needs), I'd like to get another NUC to run HA (I have two Pi's and prefer not to use them for HA).

Presumably, I will lose all my historic PV data if I load up a fresh copy on the new NUC. I'd rather not lose that data. Although it is replicated, more or less, on Solarman.

The laptop ran HA on a virtual machine. On the NUC, I will probably erase Windows 11 and run the x86-64 version of HA on it so that I don't get Windows update requests, as I do on the laptop.

Maybe I could just make a copy of the current HA data. Save it somewhere and then replace the VM version of HA with the x86-64 version on the laptop and reload data. Is that doable?

Set up the givetcp power flow card in ha today. Nice to be able to add the zappi and Eddi and see all in one place

Same for zappi

I have it always scheduled in eco+ to charge from 2 to 8, battery charges from 2 to 5. I need to automate, but at the moment the battery is active from 5am to 2am, in winter that changes to 8am to 11pm

Is there anything I can do on HA with a Phone Watch alarm system?

It uses Honeywell wireless devices to communicate with a central box, which is connected via SIM to Phone Watch and to my router via ethernet.

I might consider doing away with Phone Watch and building my own alarm system with sensors, cameras and using the above mentioned CallMeBot. I'll keep the Phone Watch box on the wall for show.

No doubt there will be home insurance ramifications for having a homebrew alarm system.

pls delete

Anyone have any nice set ups in HA using Grafana? Using it for battery view but not integrated right into the main dashboard and would prefer to have a date time filter on it too.