diy solar

diy solar

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Nov 29, 2022
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NOB please be gentle,
recently I purchased an ongrid solar package and was told that i could access my data by wifi.. i expected to be able to get data from the device in realtime but found that I had to give my private data to 3rd party as part of warranty and historical access to data and the unit must be connected to thin internet or void warranty.

I found that anyone could gain access to the unit and spy/learn my habits with a simple click of a QR code, further investigation the data was sent un encrypted to china and the web interface easily accessed and displayed my SID password in plan text. simple enough that anyone could do this.

Making the device/unit total unsafe for my family members and property safety. on top of this the electricity company have installed a 4g modem into my power meter and monitor my activities in real time and store over 192 readings of my meter per day and store that for 7 years and will not remove the invasion of my privacy as well..

im seeing that the same is said with some BT devices for off grid applicatinos if i was to go off grid being extremely insecure and/or require internet access for registration to configure/monitoring.

as an example, I recently contacted victronenergy asking/wanted a product that protected my privacy, with my requirements being no IoT device have access to the internet, no 3rd party push/pull allowed and that I store/control in realtime my own private data for historical purposes. to that they basically ask me to go way. Im seeing this with most products.

For people that what property safety and enjoy privacy, is there a list of products and.or software that respect / meet privacy and still allow for local only configuration, monitoring and and historical data capture ...
 
When I chose the solar inverter for my installation, one important factor was: NO DAMN CLOUD

Besides the dubious security, this cloud fashion has another problem: when internet or grid goes down, nothing works, which is remarkably dumb when the product is an inverter that's supposed to provide backup power when the grid goes down. It's not resilient at all. If it only uses a cloud app for configuration it will work offgrid but then you can't configure it? lol

My buddy with lots of wifi "smart" lightbulbs realized every time he pressed a switch, a packet did a roundtrip to China then back to the lightbulb to turn it on. So when his router would go down, the lights wouldn't work anymore. It's ridiculous.

Fronius inverters have an ethernet port but it doesn't require being connected to the internet in order to work. If configured, it will upload statistics to Fronius website where you can plot it (they charge for this feature lol). It auto-updates over the ethernet too. But if you run it on a LAN without internet connection it will work and you can query the inverter for data locally.

For my hybrid inverter I picked Solis S5 mostly because all the parameters fit my installation (MPPT voltage, current), it has no damn cloud, and it has a RS485 port that is user-accessible and can be queried to extract all the data with a simple homebrew microcontroller. You can buy a wifi dongle for the inverter, that will upload the data to the cloud, and then you can use their cloud API to get your data automatically: an overcomplicated process. RS485 is much simpler, keeps everything local. Several other brands offer similar features, but you have to read the fine print.
 
Agree with the above. Was thinking about enphase until I read the T&C's.

We also have a Solis (without the "send-all-my-data-to-china-stick" - which would have been pretty useless anyway as it only sends data every 5 minutes).

For monitoring... have homebrew ESP32 handling CANBus data from battery and an emonPi / openenergy monitor system that is totally local on the house network.
 
...and when the company goes belly up, the damn cloud also stops working :ROFLMAO:

Or maybe they just decide to "no longer support your obsolete model"

PS: did you publish the source code for your homebrew? I'm interested!
 
PS: did you publish the source code for your homebrew? I'm interested!
No, but it is based on @sijones2010's Smart-Shunt to Solis over CANBus code, which is on GitHub - see here...

 
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