Solar assistant: do you use it?

Sanwizard said:

Yeah, I use a Victron Shunt which is across all my batteries as a point of truth. I dont do comms with the inverters, so charging is done via Inverter parameters only and voltage as the guide. I use the cell delta data from SA to sanity check the SOC. My 7th battery has a BMS comm issue with the other BMS's, so SA does not pick it up. I ordered a V3 BMS from Adam Han at Seplos as a replacement. That BMS can do RS485 comms, so I may test that with the LVX6048WP inverters.

Click to expand...

Curious to see how the V3 BMS works out for you. I've heard the V3 will not communicate with the 10C or 10E models.

timselectric said:

I'll just put my BMS's on the second SA.
At least it will let me see them all on one page.
I already have a spare Pi and license.

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HEY! And be sure to report back! I am interested to try this too, but don't have a spare just sitting on the shelf...otherwise I would be hooking it up instead of typing late at night on the DIY Forum...LOL

Check out my simple dashboard that gives me all the information I need and it uses mqtt. I have scripts and esp32 devices that will query and report on the following:

Enphase envoy
Outback skybox
Victron smartshunt
Pacebms (SOK)
Narada bms (eg4 lifepower4)
JK bms
Openevse for solar excess charging

Did I miss anything??

Tulex said:

Change your mind? Why?
You know why I use it, I know why I use it. Will just have to agree to disagree.

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PreppenWolf said:

SA is for people who can't stop changing things or don't have stable, reliable systems. Change my mind.

If you're constantly monitoring your system you probably need a bigger one or a more reliable one. If your system isn't as reliable as the grid you built it wrong.

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Then it is for me - for sure my system isn't big enough - everytime it is, I keep adding to it.
I am constantly looking to see what else the Solar Power Plant can run, and hope to still be doing that for years to come.
Solar is a radom event, that is - it is not a sure thing - raining out tonight, not looking to good for tomorow either until later in the day.

My wife asked me - hey I am planning on two loads through the electric dryer tomorrow before lunch "just so you know" - "no problem dear".
Change to my LAN - pull up SA - 86% on the ESS - that is good, but no sun in the forcast until well after lunch, and my shop will be running some big loads tomorrow morning too. The Solar equipment is next door (my home and shop are neighbours) and since it is raining and late, I am not going to walk over there tonight. and I don't have to!

We have a grid connection of 240v 30A from the house back to the shop just for charging when needed - and TOU rates - super cheap grid power now until 7:00AM tomorrow So - A few clicks on SA and the system is now set to charge at 30A for two hours, then go automatically back to SBU.
Sip on my beverage, back to DIY Solar Forum see what RedNeckTech is up to tonight...That is why I use SA.

n2aws said:

At least you got an email back.

I've emailed them 3 times, offering to add schneider support if they are willing to let me, and I've heard nothing but crickets.

I've been playing with node-red and the schneider XW pro/insight. I've read that SA can read values from mqtt, and I can feed values from nodered into mqtt. I'm just not willing to pay the $55 license for SA, without knowing for sure if I can make it work like that.. and I'm not confident (based on the lack of response to the previous emails) that I can count on support refunding it, if it didn't work.

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They mention a trial ..not sure if you have to already have a license or not..kinda wouldn't make sense. You should post this on their forum so it's public to them and others feed off of your post and ask them about it.

cs1234 said:

Can you emulate it using Qemu?
https://www.partitionwizard.com/partitionmagic/raspberry-pi-emulator-for-windows.html

Edit.. Nevermind, that's for Raspberry.. dunno about Orange.

Edit again.. Looks like Qemu might have an emulator for Orange also..

Click to expand...

cs1234 said:

Can you emulate it using Qemu?
https://www.partitionwizard.com/partitionmagic/raspberry-pi-emulator-for-windows.html

Edit.. Nevermind, that's for Raspberry.. dunno about Orange.

Edit again.. Looks like Qemu might have an emulator for Orange also..

Click to expand...

There is a raspberry and orange pi image, but it won't run on qemu

Sanwizard said:

Yeah, I use a Victron Shunt which is across all my batteries as a point of truth. I dont do comms with the inverters, so charging is done via Inverter parameters only and voltage as the guide. I use the cell delta data from SA to sanity check the SOC. My 7th battery has a BMS comm issue with the other BMS's, so SA does not pick it up. I ordered a V3 BMS from Adam Han at Seplos as a replacement. That BMS can do RS485 comms, so I may test that with the LVX6048WP inverters.

Click to expand...

V3 isn't compatible with the 10e/10c/10d version, per seplos.
Looking forward to see if you can get it to work

wattmatters said:

I have two issues:

i. SOC drifts over time if the battery does not reset to 100%.
Over the course of a year my BMS SOCs dropped to show only ~75% (give or take) when fully charged.
The BMS requires cell (or pack) over voltage protection to kick in for the BMS to reset SOC to 100%. I don't typically charge to a voltage which causes BMS over voltage protection to be required.

ii. I have a hybrid battery bank so reading BMS data is only part of the story. I need the total bank status.

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I have a JBD BMS on my 16s ( self built ) battery , connected to a Victron MultiPlus ll . The SOC indications I get from both track very well and differs by about 2% . On another topic : I have successfully revived Li cells that had low voltages varying between 0,9 - 1,5v . These are now in this battery and supplying 60 - 80A on a daily basis and with a cells Vdelta of around 20mV and 5mV at rest. So , do not just discard them.

MaikaiLifeDIY said:

If you could find an arm-based virtualization emulator you would still need the virtual OS to simulate a pi so all the drivers and assumptions about the OS would be accessible to SA.

Basically, you would need to find a way to create a virtual pi.

Click to expand...

Crowz said:

The main problem with that is horsepower and how SA runs on it too.

Home assistant takes a good bit of hp to run decent. SA is pretty intensive too. Add the two together and even the largest pi machines will struggle to handle it.

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At this point, you might as well spend the time getting everything talking to HA directly.
My HA is on an old Dell PC and sits with my solar system, it is trivial to connect to it with USB or BT.
What I cannot get working correctly in HA is ESPhome, the devices can be setup and then disappear off the network.
Oh and the Junktec integration, simple txt output but buggered if I can get it to work.
Oh and JK via batmon.....grrrrr so bloody annoying.
HA has been frustrating to this hardware guy, but I have created a nice setup over time.

houseofancients said:

V3 isn't compatible with the 10e/10c/10d version, per seplos.
Looking forward to see if you can get it to work

Click to expand...

Yeah, me too.

Use it on Mpp-solar inverters. Much better to access and change settings. All in in real time. Watchpower has an enormous delay and often gives errors when changing settings.

In addition to that, very easy to build your own dashboard with data retrieved from SA.

Perfect platform

timselectric said:

I'll just put my BMS's on the second SA.
At least it will let me see them all on one page.
I already have a spare Pi and license.

Click to expand...

I'm doing the same thing. Just put a second license on a Pi 4

Has anyone used a
Raspberry Pi Zero 2W
Raspberry Pi Pico W
Orange Pi Zero 3
for SA ? These are the current cheapest on Amazon I can find.

cs1234 said:

Can you emulate it using Qemu?
https://www.partitionwizard.com/partitionmagic/raspberry-pi-emulator-for-windows.html

Edit.. Nevermind, that's for Raspberry.. dunno about Orange.

Edit again.. Looks like Qemu might have an emulator for Orange also..

Click to expand...

Maybe get somebody that has it installed DD a image and then emulate it. Not sure how or if SA ties the license to the hardware as it using hwinfo or lspci or mac address etc. If it's using the mac you can spoof this.

Quattrohead said:

Has anyone used a
Raspberry Pi Zero 2W
Raspberry Pi Pico W
Orange Pi Zero 3
for SA ? These are the current cheapest on Amazon I can find.

Click to expand...

If you want to use SA, you will run it of a very long time. So the savings of a cheaper board are neglectable over time. I have it running on two RPI's 4 for two years without any problems. Some friends of mine are using the Orange Pi3 and have connection problems. I would stick to the RPI4.

Quattrohead said:

Has anyone used a
Raspberry Pi Zero 2W
Raspberry Pi Pico W
Orange Pi Zero 3
for SA ? These are the current cheapest on Amazon I can find.

Click to expand...

From the Website:

Quattrohead said:

Has anyone used a
Raspberry Pi Zero 2W
Raspberry Pi Pico W
Orange Pi Zero 3
for SA ? These are the current cheapest on Amazon I can find.

Click to expand...

I just searched amazon and the pi zero 3 is $14 less than the pi 3 lts.

The pi 3 lts has 8 gb of emmc flash on board to use as a hard drive that won't fail like a sd card will.
Also a decent sd card is going to cost more than $14 probably so there is that too.

Its $60 for the pi 3 lts board, a case and a power supply as a kit. That's what I bought off amazon to run mine.

Quattrohead said:

What I cannot get working correctly in HA is ESPhome, the devices can be setup and then disappear off the network.

Click to expand...

Sounds like a Wi-Fi signal issue.

Quattrohead said:

My HA is on an old Dell PC and sits with my solar system, it is trivial to connect to it with USB or BT.

Click to expand...

For HA I use a Proxmox virtual machine on refurbished Lenovo M93p Tiny PC Intel i5-4570T 2.90GHz 8GB RAM 256GB SSD. I previously was using an RPi4.

The thing with these refurb tiny PCs is they are as cheap as or in many cases even cheaper to buy than RPis, are way more powerful and their power consumption is not that much more than the RPi. The virtual machine set up is also very flexible. I have an IT friend who does help with some set up stuff (fortunately). I also have an external SDD onto which I have automated ProxMox backups to run daily along with a separate HA cloud backup run every three days.

The HA performance difference between the RPi 4 I was using and the tiny PC is chalk and cheese. The PC is so much better/snappier. And I feel more confident about the robustness of using SSD rather than SD card, as well as the automation of backups.

This is an issue for SA - being reliant on RPi the vast majority of installations will be using SD card. It runs very well but SD cards will have a limited life and so people should at least take care to choose a good quality card.

SA introduced a manually activated backup option with their most recent update. My SA runs on an RPi3b which they supplied back in 2021, and I use an official RPi wall plug power supply. I have that connected to a spare consumer grade UPS which is in turn powered by the off-grid system (which is our home backup). I have a similar set up for the Proxmox box and my networking stuff.

Recommendations for a solid 60V DC to USB C power supply please?
Is it best to order directly from SA?

For home assistant on a pi you want the orange pi 5.


8 core powerhouse in a micro form.

I plan on putting HA on one of these eventually. I run HA under proxmox on this for now.

HP ProLiant DL360p Gen8 1U RackMount 64-bit Server with 2×6-Core E5-2640 Xeon 2.5GHz CPUs + 64GB PC3-10600R RAM + 8×300GB 10K SAS SFF HDD, P420i RAID, 4×GigaBit NIC, 2×Power Supplies



Needless to say its not bothered by home assistant but when I played with it on other machines you know its there.

42OhmsPA said:

Recommendations for a solid 60V DC to USB C power supply please?
Is it best to order directly from SA?

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Not sure on the 60v dc one. I went with the 12v dc one and got it off amazon. I would probably go with amazon on the 60v if I went that route. I was lucky having the 12v solar setup for my cameras and stuff.

Crowz said:

Not sure on the 60v dc one. I went with the 12v dc one and got it off amazon. I would probably go with amazon on the 60v if I went that route. I was lucky having the 12v solar setup for my cameras and stuff.

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I tried a 60v amazojunk one. It won't let the pi boot but it charges a phone, tablet and power bank no problem...
Thanks for the reminder I have some 12v 20ah lifepo4s laying around...

I am running a Pi3+, just wondering if anyone is actually using what I suggested as an alternative.
I might need another one.

Quattrohead said:

I am running a Pi3+, just wondering if anyone is actually using what I suggested as an alternative.
I might need another one.

Click to expand...

To me the orange pi 3 lts is hard to beat. That onboard 8gb emmc flash drive is hard to pass up. No sd card to fail over time and lightning fast.

Thing has been bullet proof for me.

42OhmsPA said:

Recommendations for a solid 60V DC to USB C power supply please?
Is it best to order directly from SA?

Click to expand...

I've been using this one for two months, if you want USB C, just use a USB A to USB C cable, however you'll only get about 5v, (standard USB voltage).