Posted by: @judith

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…and want to have the control local rather than over the cloud.

I don’t disagree, @judith, but I have found in this instance that a little pragmatism goes a long way. Trying to control my inverter through the manufacturer’s cloud offering proved utterly impractical so my efforts to set up a local means of control were entirely justifiable. However, since my ASHP needs very little actual controlling I have so far left it set up so that Home Assistant talks to the cloud offering and then stores/displays the data locally. Mitsi don’t provide a modbus interface as standard so the extra couple of hundred quid for the add-on hardware would be difficult to justify against the benefit gained. I’m still in two minds but it’s not high on my list.

Speaking of Mitsubishi units, @johndunlop, you mentioned you have an aircon unit from them that you want to integrate with Home Assistant. Do you use Melcloud at the moment? If so, that might be a good and easy next step for you.

@majordennisbloodnok we have only just had them installed and the fitter mentioned that it might be possible to set them up with HA because the MHI smart M-air app is possibly the worst one ever!

I will investigate your suggestion as I have had some success following your advice in practicing adding things to cards, one with our lights and one with the battery and inverter including some separate tabs. However I am really conscious of not running before I can crawl let alone walk!!!

Also, I think the integration for GivEnergy, Agile and Solcast is called predbat which I appear to have added when following the speak to the geek video but have absolutely no idea how it functions!

@johndunlop I’ve remained quiet so far as I suspect that @majordennisbloodnok is guiding you towards some simple HA automations, which is definitely the best introduction to Home Assistant.

As a parallel exercise, since you already have Predbat installed (and up to date?), it may be worthwhile (if you haven’t already done so) adding a selection of the recommended Apex Charts on a new HA dashboard (I suggest start with Home Battery Prediction and Solar Forecast) and run the default configuration in Monitor mode and with Read Only switch ON. Watching the graphs and the Predbat Plan, you will familiarise yourself with how your system is operating and what Predbat will do and when (regarding charging and discharging of your battery) if given control of your inverter. While still in monitor mode you can play with other Predbat settings without doing any harm. I would emphasise, though, that going this route alone will not help in developing any Home Assistant skills. 

@ianmk13 thank you for your response,

Your suggestion of a parallel excercise seems great but here is where I run into the issue of my complete lack of HA knowledge. I understand the end result you have suggested - watch what the thing does while in monitor mode so I can't make a mess of it and completely agree with that but the getting to that stage despite is the part I don't understand.

I am not sure what or where recommended apex charts are, or home battery prediction or what default configuration is, let alone monitor mode. 

Sorry for appearing a bit of a chump but I am trying to learn as I go

Thanks, @ianmk13; your suspicions were correct about my planning. I also suspect I'm going to call on you a bit more later on when we start tackling predbat since you're far more familiar than I am on that one.

As for your post, @johndunlop, you're not appearing even the slightest bit a chump. In fact, having looked at the screenshots in your penultimate post, you appear to be rather more along on your HA journey than you perhaps realise. What you've shown now means you've taken a vanilla HA instance, installed one or more integrations and got them onto a dashboard giving you useful information. Those same cards you've put on your dashboard are not only showing you what's going on but, where appropriate, are providing you with controls that allow you to make certain changes (e.g. sliders to change percentages, dropdown boxes to select from lists of values and so on). In the grand scheme of things the only thing you haven't tackled out of what I mentioned in my articles is setting up an automation or two. In other words, you have a functioning home automation system. Don't underplay what you've done so far.

I do have an idea of where to go next from here in bite-sized steps but I'll wait for now until you say you're feeling ready for moving onward. Please do, however, say and don't worry about asking lots of questions; apart from it being easier for you, it may well also help other people here who are reading the thread.

@johndunlop I was at the same stage as you at the beginning of this year and I suspect we followed the same route to get where you are now. As I recall, I only followed the Predbat documentation here.

I know that HA can seem quite daunting at first and it can take a while for things to start making some sense so don’t worry. The documentation is very comprehensive and a brief summary or checklist is here. There are plenty of YouTube videos which may help. 

@majordennisbloodnok thank you for your support,

I will have a further play around for a day or so to try and get to grips with the different default card layouts, what they can show and in what visual format, then will reach out for the next bite sized chunk!

@ianmk13 thank you for your reply, you are quite right and being honest it is a bit daunting at the moment especially with no idea of coding etc and looking to move on from simple cards to control my lighting on to what has become an essential part of the home - battery, solar and electric import/export.

Little steps but I'm sure I'll get it

@johndunlop My first HA project was to monitor various temperatures (e.g. boiler flow & return) using an ESP32 device and DS18B20 temperature sensor. All instructions discovered on the Web with minimal coding required. I then added a Shelly mains switch so that I could have decent temperature control of my greenhouse heater. I’ve not been able to get the Shelly and ESP32 to talk with each other (via Bluetooth), though, so communication is via WiFi and my HA hub. 
Try investigating what parameters (’Entities’ in HA-speak) are available for your GivTCP Device. Then go to the History dashboard to obtain graphs of how these have changed over time (limited to 7 days by default, if I remember correctly). 
The Predbat’ project won’t help you with learning about HA but is well-documented with plenty of peer support and help from the developer on Facebook which potentially has significant monetary value. 

@johndunlop Another thought just occurred to me regarding GivTCP: I found that when installed for my Givenegy All-In-One there was a confusing plethora of GivTCP entities and the significance of each one was unclear. I exported them all as a list (don’t ask me how; I can’t remember off-hand) and sorted them into different categories (energy values, power values, controls and status, if I remember correctly). Adding some order made it a little easier to have a good guess at what each one means. I hope this helps.

Hi @majordennisbloodnok 

Apologies for the radio silence,

I have been experimenting as discussed with HA but appear to have reached an impasse.

Here is an idea of my knowledge progress so far if it helps with an insight with my current understanding:- there two things that are completely stumping me are 1- finding and using things if they are not already automatically populated eg. Hue lights (which are auto populated and the inverter/battery details which I added when following the speak to the geek video but with no understanding of how it happened) and 2- making new cards from scratch or applying a new card that I have seen on forums but is not in the standard provided set.

That aside, I would be grateful for the next bite sized chunk of your plan when it is convenient.

Please let me know if I am attempting to jump forward too far with too little knowledge!

@johndunlop, no need to apologise at all. The radio silence, as you call it, only seemed to suggest to me that you were taking your time to learn at your own rate which is a Good Thing. 

Actually, the two items you've come up with provide a good next step anyway, so let's cover that now.

Firstly, I don't know if you read through the four articles I wrote about home automation but it's useful to get an idea of some of the concepts in Home Assistant. Now when you want to interact with something (and I'm going to use my heat pump as an example), you need to install what HA calls an Integration. That's basically a toolbox HA can use to talk with whatever it is you want to integrate into it. For my heat pump I'm working through the manufacturer's (Mitsubishi's) cloud offering which they call Melcloud, so I've installed the Melcloud integration, which you can see by going to your Settings and selecting "Devices and Services". That page will open up with Integrations already selected in the top middle of the screen, and I've highlighted the integration I'm focusing on.

You'll see, as I'm sure you've seen before, that in the bottom left of the tile it says there are some devices - in this case 3 devices. That means that, by using the integration, HA has found three different things it can interact with. As it happens, if those things aren't physical things (like a weather forecast), they're called services instead of devices. Nonetheless, clicking on that link takes you through to the Devices page (second page along in that list in the top middle of your page) pre-filtered to just show the devices related to the integration in question.

As you can see here, even though it's one physical box what HA is doing is thinking of my heat pump as three separate things; one hot water heater and two house heaters. The second house heater (UFH extension Zone 2) happens to be an unused zone so it's a bit of a red herring, but in all other respects HA is actually correct; if I want to heat my water tank, I need to use the pump as a water heater, whereas if I want to deal with a room's temperature I need to talk to the pump as a heating device. So the Melcloud integration has exposed two devices that happen to be inside the same physical box of bolts.

Now logically these two different devices, since they do different jobs, will have different controls and will give back different bits of information. As such, the programmers of the integration have told HA that each of these devices contains various components, which are called entities, and you can see all the entities of all the devices in all the integrations by going to the third item in your list in the top middle of your screen. Playing with the filters (top left of that screen) has let me zero in on just the Melcloud integration and only the enabled and visible entities within the devices I mentioned above.

As you can see, these entities seem pretty logical; I can get some flow out and return temperatures, and those are therefore provided by "Sensor" entities. As you would expect from a sensor, they are read-only; I can't manually change the flow temperatures, so the Sensor entities make sure HA can't try. On the other hand, I have a "Climate" entity (climate.ufh_extension_zone_1) and that's something I might well want to change (i.e. the climate in my house), so the Climate entity provides HA with the ability to do so.

These entities are what you add to cards, so the cards display those entities in the way those entities are designed to work. If an entity is a sensor, what the card will show is just a value. If an entity is a value that can be changed (a target charge level, for instance, or a target temperature), the card will show a control that allows you to change it whether that's a slider, a dropdown list, a tick box or whatever.

Now we return to the Devices page (my second screenshot) and I click on one of those devices - in this case heating - then that burrows in to a page similar to one you've seen before.

In here, we're seeing the various entities related to that device, but in a screen that is easier to read than the Entities page and also has the "Add to dashboard" links. You can also see that the entities within that device are put into logical groups down the middle of the screen; all controls together, all sensors together and so on. However, whilst it may be easier to read it's not actually saying anything different to the Entities page; same info provided in a different way.

So now we've looked at HA's jargon and what it means, we can now return to the cards. I have an Overview dashboard with several tabs and I believe you have the same kind of thing. You might even have set up several separate dashboards, but that's fine. All we need to do is go to somewhere in HA where you want a card.

If you click on the pencil in the top right hand corner of the page it will put that dashboard into Edit mode, and you will then see the "Add Card" blue button at the bottom right corner. You will also see that each card already on the page has an Edit button in its bottom left corner, and finally each existing card has a number in the bottom left that allows you to change the order in which it appears on the page.

If we were to click the Add Card button, we get a dialogue box that allows us to choose a card that's appropriate for what we want to display and do. In most cases, the Entities card is the appropriate one - the Entity card allows you to show just one entity, the Entities card allows you to show multiple. Once you're more familiar with the Entities card, the other cards and the possibilities they present will quickly make much more sense. Nonetheless, when you did your "add to dashboard" stuff from earlier in the thread what HA was doing was simply adding an Entities card to the dashboard of your choice and pre-populating it with various entities.

Now, instead of adding a new card, if we click Edit on a card we get a different dialogue box that should now make plenty of sense to you.

On the right hand side is a preview of how the card will look whilst on the left hand side is a title at the top and then further down a list of entities being displayed. If there is a pencil next to a line then you can edit that, and the bottom of the list will always be a blank entity which is where you can add another. Bear in mind that the pre-populating you did before put a load of related entities in together, but there is no reason why all the entities in the card have to make any sense together. If you want to add something completely different to the list, just click in that blank Entity line and start typing or choose from the dropdown list. The card I've got in the screenshot is for the hot water, but if I wanted to add the current weather forecast then I can. You should now be able to see, too, that all the entities we saw before on the Entities page are available in the dropdown list, and if you start typing something (whether it's text at the beginning of the entity's name or from somewhere in the middle) it will do a bit of helpful filtering for you.

I think it's time now for me to stop typing and let you get playing again, but just shout if I either haven't answered what you were talking about or any of what I've explained still isn't quite clear.