Brucey
Solar Wizard
VRM was the game changer for me. No need to huddle close to the precious to maintain bluetooth range, phone gives the portal to everything.
Not addicted to solar, just the data and monitoring
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wattmatters
Solar Wizard
I have Nabu Casa for Home Assistant so can access it all from anywhere provided I have a mobile data or other internet connection.
JungleTim
New Member
What! No Shelly switches or humidity sensors? No broadlink remote AC controllers? You're a rookiehahaha, your system sounds much like my home system:
Tesla Powerwall's plus solar
SolarEdge for monitoring inverter
Circuit Setup's CT monitoring system, for every breaker and mains
Ecobee for 2x HVAC
Tasmota for 2x ERV
EVSE for my EV charger
Ambient Weather for my local weather
Custom hardware for 2x Voltronic AIO's
Custom hardware for 2x JBD BMS's
6x custom environmental sensors (temp/particulate/co2) for each room
Tons of other things, not really related to power/solar
The biggest difference is that I have all of that routed into Home Assistant, which makes it super easy to get a sense of what everything is doing. You should *REALLY* look into setting one up at your place, it's game changer. I then have it execute logic, like if my Powerwall's drop below 20%, they turn off AC's, and turn them back on once it crosses 80%. It monitors the CO2 levels in each room, and turns on the ERV's so I'm able to maintain ~600ppm throughout the house - and if the outside temperature goes above 100f, then I bump up that limit to 800ppm. Best of all, it all runs locally (so no cloud dependencies) and it's all in one app - and when I'm gone, I just have a VPN setup to my house, so I can access it remotely via that. And to be clear, these dashboards aren't amazing or anything, I'm not HA pro, they're more just the easiest things I could get working and was happy with. But there is a learning curve...
(just kidding)
We are using an Iotawatt and EmonCMS to monitor our community private water system.
wattmatters
Solar Wizard
I have integrated with Home Assistant:
I also have a couple of Shelly PMs but have not installed them, that's likely to be shelved for the time being. Regulations mean they can only be installed by a licensed electrician.
- Fronius 3-phase smart meter for overall grid monitoring
- Iotawatt for circuit level monitoring
- Solar Assistant for the Off-grid system
- Power monitoring smart plugs for specific appliances (fridges x 2, dishwasher, washing machine, clothes dryer, pool pump, network/server)
- Solar PV forecasting with Solcast
- Daikin Wi-Fi controller for the ducted aircon
- Sensibo IR controller for the mancave aircon
- Smart globes and switches (mostly Zigbee) for phone control convenience and automations
- My MG4 EV
- I also send my EV charge control service (ChargeHQ) automated updates at 30-second intervals from my Fronius metering so that it can auto control EV charging based on excess available solar PV, or take full advantage of free grid energy periods. I may bring that into full local control at some stage but for now the ChargeHQ service works well for me.
- Internet speed tests, handy for long term monitoring our our wireless internet service
- Aqara temp/humidity/pressure monitors scatted about the place (Zigbee)
I also have a couple of Shelly PMs but have not installed them, that's likely to be shelved for the time being. Regulations mean they can only be installed by a licensed electrician.
I have a small ZigBee network mainly for fire alarms but generally use esphome for everything,
Esphome has saved me once or twice when problems have occured when I'm 9000km from home and I've been able to disable elements from the house by editing out parts of the firmware and since I'm in Asia I'm really not a fan of using anything with its own firmware.
I started using HA mainly for irrigation on the farm and to turn off outside lights that took me 5 minutes to walk to dodging various types of cobras at night.
Now I typically let it do it's thing and rarely look at dashboards apart from to tell my wife how many pennies the solar has saved us each and every day, we have sonoff nspanels dotted around the house to control anything that isn't automated and I typically buy products for the house with the main requirement that I can somehow be controlled with Ha.
Esphome has saved me once or twice when problems have occured when I'm 9000km from home and I've been able to disable elements from the house by editing out parts of the firmware and since I'm in Asia I'm really not a fan of using anything with its own firmware.
I started using HA mainly for irrigation on the farm and to turn off outside lights that took me 5 minutes to walk to dodging various types of cobras at night.
Now I typically let it do it's thing and rarely look at dashboards apart from to tell my wife how many pennies the solar has saved us each and every day, we have sonoff nspanels dotted around the house to control anything that isn't automated and I typically buy products for the house with the main requirement that I can somehow be controlled with Ha.
wpns
Solar Joules are catch and release
If you can’t measure it, you can’t control it. 
Each of my 8 HVAC splits has a Shelly 1PM on it so I can monitor and control them all remotely.
Each of my 8 HVAC splits has a Shelly 1PM on it so I can monitor and control them all remotely.
Are you just measuring the power usage?
Please tell me more.If you can’t measure it, you can’t control it.
I have ir blasters for all our mini splits but they are pretty useless on their own, I'm in the process of fitting clamp meters to all the house circuits including individual hvac circuits so I can check power usage and determine state I'll post something in the interesting projects thread once the rest of the clamp meters arrive.If you can’t measure it, you can’t control it.
The shelly pm series is a clamp meter and I believe relay so you can monitor and control the load.
Right but I was wondering how @wpns is controlling mini splits. Ive read is not good to just kill power to a mini split and wondering if that's all the 1pms are doing or if there is more.
I just finished upgrading our camper. You're not alone. I got caught just sitting staring at the work I'd done, while bouncing in and out of the Victron app.
I just ir blasters and record the IR signals from the units remote works well, except you need some form of power monitoring to actually have a state for the hvac unit.
Many of the units don't have dedicated on/off it just sends a toggle command on/off are the same signal, it's also a bit of a pain programming as atleast with the Toshiba and Daikin units I have. They send a full command string not individual signals, so [on] will be followed by temp, fan state, power output, quiet mode etc so it's much easier to have a few pre programmed options rather than the whole remote.
wattmatters
Solar Wizard
I would use an IR blaster to control a split system's operation if it did not have its own system for remote control. This ensures a safe shut down of the compressor if turning it off. I would only use a power monitoring switch/relay to kill power as an emergency load dump.
Ours have some form of canbus but i really cant be bothered to work out what it is, then decode the registers myself.
Im really not a fan of any 3rd party integrations too many have disabled api access in the years I've used home assistant, then put their goods behind a cloud paywall or just gone out of business.
Gitpulls,3rd party integrations, and everything cloud based are things i stand firmly against! hell i wont even update HA often and if i do its always at the end of a month when they have the fixes sorted before new content.
What's mine is mine, what's yours I'll steal and reengineer myself.
You just use the Shelly app on your phone and you can turn the Shelly switches on and off remotely and see their current state, if you use switches with PM (power monitoring) then the app also shows you the power flow through the switch. There are also some excellent Shelly nodes for Node-red so I use these to control the Shelly's and can turn on and off loads based on the Sunny Island grid formed frequency ensuring the PV inverters are never curtailed and I get hot water instead.
Plain switch
Power monitoring version
Tuya is a cheaper alternative but I do not trust a Chinese company whose app pulls all your WiFi SSID's and passwords from your phone. They are flaky too and prone to going offline.
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wpns
Solar Joules are catch and release
Shelly Pro 1 PM is power monitoring and control all in one. Modern inverter splits don’t care if you remove power at any arbitrary time, and they wait 5(?) minutes after power is restored before firing up. Heck, we get power failures all the time. Not that I’m turning them on and off a dozen times an hour all day long.
wpns
Solar Joules are catch and release
Oh. Very cool. I could do that. The Wi-Fi controller for my ducted units is $170 and I would need three so the ir blaster would be a lot cheaper. Thanks!
Copy. Thanks. It does have its own system at $170 each x3. They are midea ducted by the way
I personally wouldn't be comfortable with that. My mini splits have a long shut down process which involves running the outside fan at Max speed for a few seconds and other things.
You could use 2 switches or more under Node-red and when the first one turns off the 2nd and others could be turned off after a suitable delay, you could do the reverse for switching on/
Quattrohead
Solar Wizard
I run HA bare metal on an old Dell i3 tower, very easy to install but quite the learning curve for a hardware guy like me.
Getting the various devices to talk with it is the hardest thing but more and better integrations are coming out all the time. Threads like this help to spread the word.
Getting the various devices to talk with it is the hardest thing but more and better integrations are coming out all the time. Threads like this help to spread the word.
The broadcom iR blasters i use were like $4 each but something that needs to be heavily secured I wouldn't want them on the house WiFi and definitely not talking to the outside world, other than that they're great worked flawlessly for about 5-6 years apart from weird Chinese probes in my network when I first set them up.best thing is once you have one it controls everything it in the room TV's, fans, stereo system, doubt their $170 WiFi counterparts can do that other than that I use a $3 esp32 and a $7pzem AC module to measure energy consumption.
thepartyhound
Christian Prepper
- Joined
- Sep 14, 2022
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- 148
Glad to hear I'm not alone!
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