Monitoring 3 solar systems & all circuits with Home Assistant

[Texican]

I am a complete noobie with home assistant, but here is my first attempt at creating a dashboard to monitor my system.

this was needed because all 3 systems have different types of data sources, web sites, etc

OFF GRID system is 12kw with 2 LV6548 inverters and 6 eg4 batteries. It uses Solar Assistant for data.

GRID TIE - ground mount system is 4.9kw using a new SMA6000us-41 inverter with internal wifi/sunny portal.

GRID TIE - roof mount system is 6.4kw using a 10 year old SMA6000 inverter, with an antique datalogger with no accessable data. I get its production and load data from the emporia vue

All circuits in the off grid house, and also on 2 grid only outbuildings are using the emporia vue 2 systems for monitoring.

I wish I could use some of the other info from Solar Assistant like % of battery charging, and average battery state of charge ( I have a display of batt SOC, but it is actually the data from batt #2 which I selected as it seemed about average among the 6 batteries) These 2 items seem to be calculations not data so are not avbl from the inverters

I also wish I could add and subtract the info from 2 different sensors, to display the total PV of the 2 grid tied systems and also the power returned to the grid after the loads

another minor issue is that all the circuit use data from emporia view is based on the 1 minute data they supply to home assistant, if you use the emporia app itself they have 1 second/instant data avbl

I have a 32 inch TV setup at a full time monitor. I usually display the first dashboard which shows the solar power etc during the day, and then switch to the circuit usage dashboard after dark, so I can see all loads and also batt charge rate and SOC

suggestions/comments appreciated

 

[Shimmy]

It might be easiest to use InfluxDB and Grafana when you need to do math.

 

[Texican]

It might be easiest to use InfluxDB and Grafana when you need to do math.

I got some help from an HA forum and was able to add the calculated values. added the 3 gauges on the far right

Ive seen some very cool displays on grafana but seems pretty complicated

 

[wattmatters]

Having a dashboard for live displays is nice. I also suggest setting up HA's inbuilt Energy Dashboard for historical tracking of system performance.

I have my off-grid system and my grid-tied system data combined there:



Off-grid system data via Solar Assistant, and grid system data via the HA Fronius integration.

I also wish I could add and subtract the info from 2 different sensors, to display the total PV of the 2 grid tied systems and also the power returned to the grid after the loads

It is possible to create a custom sensor which performs maths on other sensors. There are all sorts of possibilities.

e.g. I created one last week to track the difference in exports between two phases. Provided we are not using our ducted aircon, these two phases have all but no loads with the exception of one phase on which my hot water PV diverter operates.

So I created a sensor for each phase which increments exported energy only, resetting each day to zero, then another sensor which shows the difference between them. It tells me how much energy has been diverted to my hot water storage that day.

This morning so far 0.56 kWh, yesterday was 3.9 kWh.



Depending on your background with this sort of stuff, it might be easy for you, or take a bit of time to learn. It's taken me quite a while.

I also have a range of automations running, some controlling loads, some controlling the operating status of the off-grid inverter, some controlling the manner of battery charging etc. They use input data from various sources, grid-tied PV system data, off-grid data, battery SOC, solar PV forecast data and so on.

 

[Texican]

I would like to use the HA energy dashboard also but right now most of my sensors are not classified the way HA needs them to be able to use them in the energy dashboard. I know I can somehow modify their properties in the config.yaml file so they will be in the energy category, but have not done so yet
my inputs are from solar assistant for the off grid, SMA integration just for the PV value from the 4.9kw gridtie system and everything else is from emporia vue using 1 minute averages. the emporia data takes about 2 minutes to update so kinda sucks. I wish I had spent more and got the IOTAWATT system instead of emporia but now with 4 emporias monitoring 4 different panels it would cost a fortune to switch