I recently got solar installed at my place and was wondering if anyone had tips on things like:
- Using the Energy dashboard effectively
- Template Sensors I should set up for energy tracking
- Graphs or visualising production/usage in dashboards
- Automations that you’ve used to help save using energy from the grid
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Look up your inverter brand and pray there is an integration for it. Also: try to make your electrical meter smart to be able to tell the difference between pulling from grid and delivering to grid. If you already have a smart meter, see if it exposes some interface (like P1 with the DSMR protocol for example) to easily integrate the meter into home assistant.
I have done all this with a goodwe inverter and a kamstrup meter P1 port using a DSMR dongle.
If you need any pointers, dm me.
My solar is going up next week, so I’ve been experimenting a bit with working it into my current setup. I have import and export data from my smart meter, hourly electricity price from entso-e and a simulated solar production based on the lux reading from my outdoor pir sensors. To get real time production I specced an elko smart tag energy meter on the fuse for the inverter, as the solis is not easy for an amateur to get data out of. I also have smart relay on my water heater, and have been controlling this based on electricity price for a while now. I’m also working on adding the heat pump and bathroom heat, they will be set a couple of degreees lower when power is most expensive, and a couple higher when solar is produsing to “store” heat. Not sure how all this will work out yet so I’ll not share the details before I’m sure it works, but I hope it gives som ideas.
For visualizations I use apexcharts, i can fit solar production, consumption and price with and without grid tariff in a single card, althought it’s not quite perfekt yet.
I’ve been enjoying the power-flow-card-plus and energy-flow-card-plus visualizations. I’ve also set up a custom Grafana graph (HA -> InfluxDB -> Grafana).
I’m following this description of how to get my data from the HTTP API on my Enphase Envoy unit.
Thanks heaps for that. At the moment I’m relying on my Enlighten app login. Will check them out.
I had more success with using my energy monitor sensors than my inverter ones. My inverter (SolarEdge) seemed to have a fairly low refresh rate, and there’s also no information on power use.
I have a Sense energy monitor that has real time measurements and instead use that for my dashboard production and usage graph.
