diy solar

diy solar

Home Assistant - Solar Monitoring and Management

I've been looking into that Home Assistant software for a couple of weeks and have experienced nothing but mass confusion.

It looks like something I would really like to use, and I have so many things I'd like it to do.. but yikes, I'm totally lost with it.. and I can't find any training information.

My original idea was to set it up on my Window's PC just to play around and make it monitor my SMA inverters.. I can't even get it to do that.

I don't know any programming languages except Visual Basic, and with that, I can make Microsoft Access sing and dance.. but I'm totally stuck with the Home Assistant thing..
 
I've been looking into that Home Assistant software for a couple of weeks and have experienced nothing but mass confusion.

It looks like something I would really like to use, and I have so many things I'd like it to do.. but yikes, I'm totally lost with it.. and I can't find any training information.

My original idea was to set it up on my Window's PC just to play around and make it monitor my SMA inverters.. I can't even get it to do that.

I don't know any programming languages except Visual Basic, and with that, I can make Microsoft Access sing and dance.. but I'm totally stuck with the Home Assistant thing..
I feel your pain.

I managed to get HA up and running, and I managed to get Solar Assistant "integrated" showing data from my off-grid system.
I even got some data from my grid tied inverter as well

Today I tried to integrate some Tuya smart plugs into HA but am failing dismally. My god HA is an awful user experience. My head hurts. Literally after hours and hours of just trying to make a switch turn on and off, let alone try to apply some logic to when it does that.

I can't even get Tuya to integrate with HA. It fails when I try to complete the log in details and for the life of me I can't work out why.
 
I feel your pain.

I managed to get HA up and running, and I managed to get Solar Assistant "integrated" showing data from my off-grid system.
I even got some data from my grid tied inverter as well

Today I tried to integrate some Tuya smart plugs into HA but am failing dismally. My god HA is an awful user experience. My head hurts. Literally after hours and hours of just trying to make a switch turn on and off, let alone try to apply some logic to when it does that.

I can't even get Tuya to integrate with HA. It fails when I try to complete the log in details and for the life of me I can't work out why.
Isn't there some kind of training or coaching available somewhere?
 
Isn't there some kind of training or coaching available somewhere?
There is a Youtube for everything including Home Assistant, 1st things 1st, Get Internal and external ip's routing right, then security, Duckdns with Let's encrypt - for free cloud, Samba so you can see sd card from your window 10 machine's explorer, and Virtual Studio Code - to edit Config-yamal, Joe Assistant, haha @wattmatters
 
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There is a Youtube for everything including Home Assistant, 1st things 1st, Get Internal and external ip's routing right, then security, Duckdns with Let's encrypt - for free cloud, Samba so you can see sd card from your window 10 machine's explorer, and Virtual Studio Code - to edit Config-yamal, Joe Assistant, haha @wattmatters
I know you're speaking English.. but none of that made any sense. I picked out DNS and encrypt.. and of course "free" is my favorite word.. and I use sd cards frequently.. the rest is shamalamadingdong..
 
There is a Youtube for everything including Home Assistant
I've watched multiple YouTubes. They all gloss over steps along the way, usually a stumbling block of some kind that doesn't appear in the process they show and so the rest of their videos are a complete waste of time because you can't get through the front door.

I had to laugh, one guy even said up front he was frustrated with this very issue when he was starting with it so decided to do his own tutorial video and not gloss over stuff. 5 minutes in and yep, he was glossing over stuff and you are left think, well WTF do I do now? Google some more, end up back at the same links you started with and the cycle begins all over again.

This stuff shouldn't need YouTubes. It should just work when you plug it in, the system sees it on the network and asks if you want to connect. But no, you have to go off and down load 15 apps, create a bajillion accounts for services you have no idea what they really do, read QR codes, find secret keys, navigate some ridiculous menu structures using language from a teenager's first attempt at a sci-fi novel and in the end it never bloody works.

I just want to turn a switch on and off. It amazes me how ridiculous difficult they make it.
 
I feel ya, been trying to get JBD-Bms HA integration working - frustrating, but atleast have got this far and truly like this sht. This is Grafana with InfluxDB - it's what Solar Assistant is wrote in, it works. More graphs and gauges, just started to learn.
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I've watched multiple YouTubes. They all gloss over steps along the way, usually a stumbling block of some kind that doesn't appear in the process they show and so the rest of their videos are a complete waste of time because you can't get through the front door.

I had to laugh, one guy even said up front he was frustrated with this very issue when he was starting with it so decided to do his own tutorial video and not gloss over stuff. 5 minutes in and yep, he was glossing over stuff and you are left think, well WTF do I do now? Google some more, end up back at the same links you started with and the cycle begins all over again.

This stuff shouldn't need YouTubes. It should just work when you plug it in, the system sees it on the network and asks if you want to connect. But no, you have to go off and down load 15 apps, create a bajillion accounts for services you have no idea what they really do, read QR codes, find secret keys, navigate some ridiculous menu structures using language from a teenager's first attempt at a sci-fi novel and in the end it never bloody works.

I just want to turn a switch on and off. It amazes me how ridiculous difficult they make it.
I'm not even sure what you're mad at.. Big Pi? Who is They? Sounds like to me you need an all in one system with a switch. Great! To each their own. But here on the internet we have all types, and believe it or not, some folks like rolling their own, it's fun to build stuff.... DIY SOLAR FORUM indeed

Yup, installing your own OS and configuring stuff on Linux is more advanced. It requires some knowledge built up over time. That is why the folks at Home Assistant came up with their HAOS that starts running HA out of the box. The trade off is you get an extremally stripped down OS that doesn't do much of anything but run HA.
 
I'm not even sure what you're mad at
I wasn't mad. Just frustrated. The guides and videos make out it's pretty simple. Aside from being DIY place, it's also a forum to vent a little, nothing wrong with that.

In the end I was able to get the Tuya integration in HA running. It was a case of the country setting in the HA integration not being compatible with the server location setting in Tuya. I followed the guides on which to choose and that did not work. It wasn't possible to know that was the cause of the problem until I went through to eliminate stuff one by one. Googling settings used by others suggested recommended location combinations which worked for them, but they did not work for me.

So now my Tuya server is set to Western Europe and the integration country setting is set to the United Kingdom as that's the only combination I could get to work.

I now have an automation running for the pool pump, which turns on 2:15 hours after sunrise and off 3:00 hours before sunset. The caveat being it won't turn on if battery SOC is <95%, and it will turn off if SOC falls below 95%. It's due to switch off in a little under 2 hours, so keeping an eye on that to check it does what it should.
 
I now have an automation running for the pool pump, which turns on 2:15 hours after sunrise and off 3:00 hours before sunset. The caveat being it won't turn on if battery SOC is <95%, and it will turn off if SOC falls below 95%. It's due to switch off in a little under 2 hours, so keeping an eye on that to check it does what it should.
Just a follow up.

The automation is working as it should although I changed the early termination trigger from a battery SOC value to a battery voltage value.

This was following a discovery about the way the SOC value is determined by the emulated BMS of Solar Assistant which makes it inaccurate to a significant degree in my case.

The Solar Assistant software is going to be upgraded to rectify this issue but for now I having it running well with the low voltage cutoff trigger in place if needed.
 
Home Assistant is definitely has a learning curve. It is NOT a plug-and-play system.

It was, and still is, designed around the premise of offering more ... functionality, versatility, and customizations ... than the Google Homes, Alexa's and other, out-of-the-box plug-and-play style systems.

Having said that, once you get the hang of it, I doubt you'd go back to anything else ... its functionality and customizability are just that good. There are a few really good Youtube profiles that I follow who give good instructions but a lot of it is more general rather than answering specific compatibility issues. That's probably Home Assistants' biggest failing is that many issues are 'lost' in the plethora of posts and blogs, and unfortunately, many issues, in my experience can be quite specific to your setup or your situation.

Keep plugging away and you will get there. And on the topic of Tuya ... the Tuya integration and use of devices has gone through many iterations and is currently still in a state of flux ... if you find you can get it working for yourself ... don't change it! It's the reason many in the HA community avoid Tuya-based devices.
 
I'm somewhat down the track from a few months ago. I have plenty of stuff set up, most works OK, some stuff is still patchy.

The Tuya switches work fine, the switch state however comes and goes in terms of reliability. IOW the switch would turn on/off as per the logic but the switch state does not always update correctly. It was supposedly fixed in a recent update of HA and it did go back to working but still sometimes it gets it wrong. It could be due to poor wifi signal for some switches.

I would like them to be controlled locally rather than via the Tuya server but the local Tuya system hack is just too complex. I for sure get the deal with people going with other types of devices operating using different protocols and wireless networks.

It's not just a question of what family of devices/system you use but how available are these things? Tuya devices (here the brand is Arlec) are sold by one of the largest retailers in the country, getting them is easy as is returning them if you need. Some of the recommended devices are sold by small web stores or comes from overseas and there is no guarantee you'll be able to get what you need or have any sort of recourse when there is a fault.

What have I got running?
- Tuya integration for some switches, a couple are power/energy monitoring
- Solar Assistant integration (uses MQTT) for my off-grid solar PV/battery system
- Fronius (Solarnet) integration for my grid tied inverter into the Energy module
- Solcast PV forecast into the Energy module
- CO2 signal into the Energy module (still seems buggy)
- InFlux DB, and
- Grafana (using that to generate charts for a few things of interest)
- My Lovelace dashboard
- Speedtest (I have an automated thrice daily test of my internet speeds)

Some examples:

Lovelace dashboard:

Screen Shot 2022-01-26 at 7.49.03 am.png

Energy Module:

Screen Shot 2022-01-26 at 7.50.31 am.png

Grafana (in this example plotting my grid feed in voltages per phase as I am dealing with some grid voltage issues):

Screen Shot 2022-01-26 at 7.51.40 am.png
 
I've been running HA a very long time. But not using the energy module yet. I have all of the IQ7s and panels hidden to keep things cleaner but I use this more than the Enphase apps. The "internet" card is some leftover fiber troubleshooting. And a cloudy day, lol.

HA_1.jpg
HA_2.jpg
 
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