On the subject of automating battery charging schedules, my further searches have led me to Wonder Watt. It's probably old news to people here, but it looks like a very useful tool for automating - albeit in a manually-adjustable way on a pretty interface - charging slots according to Agile prices and predicted solar PV output. It's currently compatible with Growatt and GivEnergy inverters, and it looks as though the developer is going to add FoxESS next. Currently free while in beta - what will happen with pricing after that seems uncertain.

There is definitely HA &a GivEnergy system for using ashp and agile and a very active community forum.

In addition there is a Predbat HA tool available (user developed as usual) The forum seems to be accessible to people without a givenergy system since there’s been several threads of people asking what to do/buy.

Posted by: @jamesw

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further searches have led me to Wonder Watt.

I am using it, took a week of slight tweaks to get the PV settings correct, we have quite a bit of trees giving shading so had to compensate. But works pretty well now.

Did have GivTCP on HA, but it never worked well at forecasting and generally got the charge rate wrong. So deleted it from HA. 

Wonder Watt was a breeze to setup and get running.

How does one discover if their inverter, battery storage and ASHP are compatible with Home Assistant? Is there a specific site whereby you enter your system makes etc and it will simply say yes or no?

If mine is compatible I would likely go for the HA Green as I'm useless at tech stuff. I get extremely frustrated and tend to launch things out of windows if it frustrates me too much.  Need a HA For Dummys guide lol.

Posted by: @morgan

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How does one discover if their inverter, battery storage and ASHP are compatible with Home Assistant? Is there a specific site whereby you enter your system makes etc and it will simply say yes or no?

If mine is compatible I would likely go for the HA Green as I'm useless at tech stuff. I get extremely frustrated and tend to launch things out of windows if it frustrates me too much.  Need a HA For Dummys guide lol.

In HA 'add integration' search for the manufacturer of your device.  This will tell yo if there is native support 

Load HACS (home assistant community store) then search in hacs from your manufacturer.  This will tell you if there is community contributed support.

Or search 'your device name home assistant' in your favourite search engine.

Not quite as simple as yes/no but not too challenging.  I loaded up ha for the first time three weeks ago and within a week elapsed time and perhaps 10 hrs of active fiddling had an automation running to charge my car in a way that optimises PV use and plays well with my solar dhw diverter.   Much of the time was spent exploring what information was available to base the on/off decision on and deciding that it wasnt helpful, in the end I opted for the simplest - my current energy import/export.  Basically it's pretty easy to use.  You can run it on a virtual machine in windows or a pi if you have one, it's a simple load the image and go operation.  There is a getting started article on this site.

Posted by: @morgan

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How does one discover if their inverter, battery storage and ASHP are compatible with Home Assistant? Is there a specific site whereby you enter your system makes etc and it will simply say yes or no?

If mine is compatible I would likely go for the HA Green as I'm useless at tech stuff. I get extremely frustrated and tend to launch things out of windows if it frustrates me too much.  Need a HA For Dummys guide lol.

Because Home Assistant accommodates people writing their own integrations there is, as @jamespa says, not a yes/no answer. The answer will be "yes, natively", "yes, 'cos someone else wrote it" or "yes, if you want to write it yourself".

Which hybrid inverter do you have? One of us will be very likely able to give you a "yes/no", thereby sidestepping the Internet searching.

@majordennisbloodnok 

AlphaESS Smile5 5.0kW Hybrid Inverter.

@morgan, it appears there is nothing bundled with Home Assistant but that there are at least two community-developed integrations - one that links in with AlphaESS's web API and one that supports talking with the inverter directly using modbus. How good they are I have no idea but at least with two separate options there's a reasonable chance you could get one of them up and running.

Two things I should point out before you part with any money to get Home Assistant Green. They're not to put you off but to ensure you're fully aware of the facts before you start spending anything.

1. These being community-developed integrations any support provided depends on the time and inclination of the contributors. Usually this is pretty reasonable but to give an example back at the end of 2023 AlphaESS made changes to their API. This was not a problem given the contributors released an updated integration but could have been a show-stopper if they'd decided not to continue supporting and developing it. That's not just a problem for these integrations; it's something to bear in mind with all community-developed integrations (what @jamespa referred to as HACS)
2. Until you install the integrations and see what they do (or not) you won't have a definitive answer as to whether either will meet your needs. This is not just for HACS integrations, by the way, but can also be an issue for official Home Assistant-bundled ones too. For instance, I have a Growatt inverter and when I finally managed to get the official Growatt integration working for a short while it was blindingly obvious it had been designed to pull data but not to update any settings. That's why I went on to find an HACS integration that worked with my inverter and, incidentally, that one works fine.

Posted by: @majordennisbloodnok

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@morgan, it appears there is nothing bundled with Home Assistant but that there are at least two community-developed integrations - one that links in with AlphaESS's web API and one that supports talking with the inverter directly using modbus. How good they are I have no idea but at least with two separate options there's a reasonable chance you could get one of them up and running.

 

How do I find the intergrations you mention?  I searched on HA and 'Alpha' doesn't appear anywhere.

@jamespa 

Looked for how to find and instal HACS. Might be somewhat beyond my ability.  I did say that I was sh*t at tech stuff?

@morgan, this isn’t meant to be a bit of self promotion but I covered HACS in my fourth article about home automation ( https://renewableheatinghub.co.uk/forums/inside-the-home/maximising-home-automation-integrating-octopus-energy-more#post-32690). In that article, I was using HACS to install the Octopus integration but it’s exactly the same process for any others.

I should also say that if you need a hand then you can always send me a message. I can’t guarantee to be able to answer all questions but I certainly have the advantage of familiarity.