With OH you can also forecast your own consumption and charge just as much as you’ll need to get through the night to minimize losses and maximize battery use and feed-in.
That’s what my EMS does to optimize the monetary side, that’s complicated in the details though and highly dependent on your country and regulations. In Germany the utility companies have to pay you for returning it to grid, in Spain they do not ? If not, regulation is likely to change there, too.
Also think the big picture. With all the ugly stuff in climate crisis and geopolitics going on,
any renewable energy you produce is a good thing (even if you put it to the grid for free) and helps the climate and with your personal energy independence. With a PV + heat pump setup, you can get rid of others’ gas and oil.
I also intentionally selected the inverter I chose because it has UPS capabilities and can run off grid so at least in summer with generation > usage, I’m not dependent on the power companies.
I think you’re overdoing this point.
Yes you need a tank large enough to cover the worst case scenario but it has been like that ever with fossile heating, too. And remember a heat pump is a (albeit low power) instant heater, too.
A large tank is just a little more expensive than a smaller one and all by itself a tank does not create losses in efficiency, it’s rather an enabler: the more storage capacity the more you can make good use of excess solar power.
With intelligent control you now can determine each and every hour how much you want to fill it, depending on current usage and generation stats, optimizing for overall efficiency.
Hi,
just a question at least a little bit reagarded to this thread I hope.
Btw I live in Sweden and I have an Kostal Piko without battery. In Sweden you get paid for the power you deliver to the grid often regarded to Spot-pool price( there is I assume also other ways to get paid but this is the one my grid-company use). Then you get contribution from the tax-company like 0.06 Euro for each kWh you have used from the grid.
So then to my question @mstormi ,
" I also intentionally selected the inverter I chose because it has UPS capabilities and can run off grid so at least in summer with generation > usage, I’m not dependent on the power companies. "
Has your inverter capabilities to cut of the connection to grid when there is nothing delivered from there ? I am planning a system like that for my girlfriends house( she also has an Kostal Piko and is planning to design it with a battery) and then she likes to be able to have the inverter running automatically from Solarpanels or battery even without power from the grid. We are not allowed to deliver any power to the grid during the time the grid for some reason are out of power itself. So my plan is to install an phase-guard and an power switch between here house and the grid.
Sadly not, even net metering is a minor miracle here. The previous government actively tried to sabotage home solar installations with taxes and regulations making them unattractive. Paying people for the energy they generate will require another mental step forward that has not occurred yet.
This is true, of course. The sums of money involved are not really enough for me to worry about.
Not if you have instant heating with gas, which is what I have now, or instant electrical heating, which is common in the UK. But obviously I’d like to ditch gas.
Just wanted to put this out here in case it’s usefull for anyone else:
I recently acquired an Alpha Outback Solar Power Converter SPC III for a modest offgrid system and I couldn’t figure out how to get the inverterdata into OpenHab. I have no experience with modbus at all and have no real desire to get into all that. The Inverter came with an application called ‘WatchPower’, as seems to be the case with a lot of other branded OEM Inverters like Voltronic, Axpert, Mppsolar, PIP, Voltacon and Effekta. The WatchPower app, although functional, wasn’t of any use to me at all. After quite some searching I stumbled upon a nifty docker-based solution that reads all the data from the inverter and dumps it to mqtt, which is my ‘weapon of choice’ anyway. It was designed originally with Home Assistant in mind but can also be used perfectly with OpenHab.
Found this thread yesterday and interested to see if we can re-invigorate @raaahbin s original request.
I’m now in the market for Solar PV, Inverter and Battery and like Robin, a key requirement for me is the ability to integrate with the system and OpenHab such that I can read data and make use of it (I can think of all sorts of cool ideas like flashing hue lights green/amber/red / Alexa announcements when we move during the day from Solar to Battery to Grid for example).
Each Solar installer seems to have their favourite inverter (And of course each supplier has the best one!). I’ve been quoted to install inverters from:-
Solis
SolarEdge
Fox ESS
Sunsynk
Lux
Of these I think only SolarEdge has a dedicated binding?
What I’m trying to understand, with the help of this community, is:-
“Does it really matter?” i.e. is it the case the the Modbus binding works with the inverters above as @mstormi suggests above?
I’m reluctant to get an inverter that I cannot integrate to, and whilst I imagine a web scrapping option will work for any cloud / local webpage if it came to it (obviously this is a sub-optimal / fragile approach) - I’d rather go with a tried and tested integration option. I really don’t want to have to reverse engineer an API
A tricky question as I guess there are very few folk with knowledge of more than their own inverter, but would really appreciate replies along the lines of “I have inverter x and [have/have not] integrated it with OpenHab using [method x]”.
Inverter selection is a sometimes tricky compromise features vs. price and about getting it at all and in time. In the first place I’d go for a common brand (which only SolarEdge is out of these).
Chances are higher to get a replacement and someone that knows how to and is willing to debug and repair 5 or 10 yrs into the future. Chances are also higher someone on the net will have integrated with openHAB or other HA system and will have documented how.
While almost all inverters can do Modbus (I know of two that don’t I think those were RCT and Sofar) this is still true if you go for that binding because you need to know the exact registers and their workings, and this is always a vendor and sometimes model specific thing.
I’m commercially selling an energy management based on openHAB.
Here’s the list of vendors it currently supports: Unterstützte PV-Anlagen » Storm.house
I have a Sofar inverter (HYD EP 5000) with 2 batteries (GTX5000) and I read the inverter via Modbus. Actually I bought a device from Waveshare which is connected to the inverter and converts the Modbus data to mqtt. Everything is working fine
Because my openHAB device is not close to my inverter. And I would need a serial to usb device. There are probably better approaches, but this was the easiest way for me.
The device you showed is a serial to Ethernet converter so you don’t need any serial to USB, you can simply use the Modbus/TCP binding. Point it at the converter’s IP.
I’ve installed 1x Huawei SUN2000-2KTL-L1 inverter. With the latest firmware level it is possible to use modbus tcp without the sdongle (using port 6607 instead of 502). To open this port it is necessary to execute the following procedure (in a mobile phone with fusion app): Go to device commissioning, connect to your inverter (needs installer password), then go to Settings → Communication configuration → Router connection settings. Then, select your local wifi access point, enter your password and check the option “Local O&M”, then click Connect. It will reconnect to your access point, but this time port 6607 is open on local lan.
Now that I’ve finally got a solar PV system installed, and I do indeed have it working beautifully with openHAB, I suppose I should reply to my own post to say that I have Enphase IQ7A microinverters and the associated Enphase Envoy, along with the just-updated version of the Enphase binding from @hilbrand (see post in Enphase binding thread). I used a combination of webgui configuration for the Envoy bridge, along with a .things file for the inverters, and then a whole lot of items and persistence rules, but there is now a huge amount of data in near-real-time coming from the Envoy and every attached microinverter.
The Enphase solution is probably overengineered for anyone who doesn’t have such problems with shading on their available roof area (at this time of year, production on the west side of our roof goes up on a cloudy day), but at least one up-side of spending all that money on a system which handles the shading well is some really comprehensive data.
I use SBFspot to fetch the inverter data from a SMA Sunny Boy 4000TL-21 inverter. The data points are stored in a SQLite database which I query by means of a Python script, and then I post the relevant parameters to openHAB over the REST API.
Using Panels with Enphase microinverters with the envoy monitor. This has a local API (with some “secret” services). They return a json message that I read using the http binding and split into the seperate values using a json transform. Using two services I get the total and each seperate panel.
