is anybody using a SMA Sunny Tripower Hybrid X with openhab?
I am wondering what the differences between the Fronius Symo Gen24 plus and the SMA hybrid inverters are regarding controlling and integrating them with/into openhab.
The SMA comes with the “new” ennexOS and I wonder whether this has any implications regarding its openness compared to Fronius. Ideally somebody could tell me which functioniality the SMA/Fronius lack without cloud and just openhab compared to each other. Is one of them better if one wants to use it locally or do they share the same cloud functionality and hence the same lack of functionality without cloud and just openhab?
While I am not against cloud usage, I would like to be able to also control it locally, i.e. the charging of a battery from the net based on dynamic pricing. Using the data to control the heat pump based on the PV production. For the future maybe integrating an electric car as battery.
E3/DC One 12, if I understood correctly, is a lot more closed.
I have a SMA Sunny Tripower hybrid inverter STP-5.0SE. This is basically a Sungrow inverter with a SMA software.
I have integrated the inverter into openHAB using Modbus. Mainly i use it to read the inverter parameters. Control is a different story. Basically the inverter controls the BYD battery system. I would not recommend to interact here but there are people who do this as well.
Looking to charge the battery based on dynamic pricing the expert is @mstormi . He also knows a lot about SMA and Sungrow.
Thanks for the feedback! The hybrid X is not Sungrow Hardware anymore, if I understood correctly. So assuming that ennexOS does not offer less local features vie Modbus, it would be ok.
Had a look to their portfolio. SMA still offers the “Smart Energy” inverters (identical in construction with Sungrow). But they are limited to 10kW.
New is their “X-Series” with higher power ranges up to 30kW. Interesting would be, if a defect “Smart Energy” inverter would be replaced by the same type in a few years or if they offer a “X-Series” type then?
I think, such aspects are behind the view of @mstormi.
At a photovoltaic forum I was told that the Sunny Boy Smart Energy and the hybrid X inverters are a SMA development. Before, the hardware was completely identical to Sungrow.
Btw. is it true that for SMA, if you want to load your battery from the grid, you can only tell it to load from the grid and not how much? For e.g. Fronius one can tell with how much W the battery should be loaded.
And is it also true that if you write e.g. 0 to the register 40016, SMA deactivates the internal control of the house power completely? So if you had a surplus of 500 W and would tell the inverter to not feed anything to the grid but into the battery by setting 40016 to 0 and then some other device kicks in, e.g. your toaster with an additional 2000W, the inverter would still continue to feed the battery instead of using the 500 W surplus (or even more in the meantime) to cover the toaster?
This is right. SMA claims for the STP-xx-SE that they use a “basic hardware platform” delivered by Sungrow but that the software is completely SMA.
I am not sure if i understood exactly what you intend t do and would not recommend the interaction of multiple battery management control pathes. If you let the inverter control the battery system, there are 2 cases of loading from the grid:
Battery is automatically loaded from the grid (mainly at night in the winter time) to avoid deep discharge below the defined SoC.
Case 2 is the following scenario, valid for the STP-xx-SE: if the generated power of e.g. additional balcony inverters exceeds your base consumption, the Home Manager 2.0 detects this and the inverter loads the battery additionally through the grid path before feeding power into the grid. Limitation is of course the inverters max. charge power.
For my STP-5.0SE, the max charge power can be set between 0W and 7500W. The Modbus register 40016 is for “normalized active power limitation by PV system ctrl”.
Well this forum is not a photovoltaic one and not to help you with selecting hardware.
[ we don’t mind of course, but that’s not the forum purpose ]
But I own a Sungrow myself plus I develop a HEMS https://storm.house/ems that can control both, Sungrow and SMA (and Fronius, too), and to be frank, I got to dislike SMA very much because of their software.
Controlling the Sungrow was pretty straightforward, SMA not at all, particularly so when you want to do it directly without their SHM.
So pretty funny (or awkward?) to hear their hardware is identical …
