Local monitoring and control of inverter - gaps in understanding

Majordennisbloodnok · 2023-10-10T12:23:37Z

Hi, all My wife and I have reached the next step on our renewable energy journey and I find myself needing to fill in some gaps in my understanding. Your help, therefore, will be much appreciated. The current situation We have an array of 18 solar panels providing approximately 6.5kWp connected to a Growatt SPH5000 inverter and feeding a Growatt 6kW battery - both installed outside on one of our house's external walls. The inverter is grid-connected and we have an export MPAN allowing us to export under an Agile Outgoing tariff with Octopus Energy. We also have an Agile import tariff also with Octopus Energy and we have a SMETS-2 smart meter. The inverter uses a ShineWIFI-S module to talk with Growatt's cloud offering and my wife and I are able to keep track of what's going on both with ShinePhone apps on our phones and tablets and also with a web application of theirs. This has been installed and working fine for just under two years now so we have had a chance to iron out any initial setup wrinkles. What's changed and what we want to achieve About six months ago we switched from one of Octopus' flexible tariffs to their Agile import tariff. It made sense since our battery allows us to avoid the expensive 4-7pm slot and so analysing the figures shows it's a significantly cheaper option for us. That also means, however, that we are now being alerted to plunge prices and there have been several since we switched. We would like to make better use of this and that means having a greater degree of control over the inverter and battery, at least manually but preferably intelligently and automatically. It quickly became obvious we would benefit from a centralised and local home automation provision. Since I work in IT, the many concerns raised on this forum about Home Assistant are largely irrelevant to me since I'm hardly a beginner to computing technicalities and since I also work with someone else who has implemented Home Assistant for their solar array, it seemed a logical choice. As a result, I now have a Home Assistant server running HAOS (the Debian flavour) on an X86-64 PC (a little old but still with an over-embarrassment of resources) and physically connected to a cat6 local area network. Connection to the Internet is via fibre to the premises, so there are most certainly no bandwidth or latency issues, but it is via a fairly commonplace domestic router so traffic logging is pretty much non-existent. The Home Assistant installation is working fine and has been configured to connect to, monitor and, where appropriate, control quite a lot of devices on the network. It also connects to MelCloud to monitor and control our Mitsubishi Ecodan ASHP via a cloud integration. We also, perhaps obviously, have another integration that communicates fairly comprehensively with Octopus' API and so we are able to see a lot of data including the day-ahead half hourly prices once released. The problem is that we should be able to do the same kind of thing with our Growatt inverter but Growatt themselves have a history of putting roadblocks in the way of any home automation systems that keep customers from using Growatt's own cloud offering and user interface. As a result, I am rapidly losing patience with them and my hopes I will be able to integrate with their web API are fading quickly. However, I would prefer not to lose the functionality of the ShinePhone app and related web page since that allows me to occasionally check on the battery/export situation whilst away from home. That means I want to explore what may be possible in terms of creating some way of communicating directly with the inverter over the local network, preferably in a manner that still allows the ShineWiFi module to continue working in the same way it has done to date. In particular, we want to be able to implement logic like "Our battery's full and we can see there will be a period of negative pricing during the night, therefore discharge the battery during a particularly profitable point during the rest of the day and then forcibly recharge the battery from the grid during the negative pricing half-hours." or "the forecast for the coming day is great charging weather but there are some really good export rates duing the morning therefore change the priority so any solar energy produced is exported until x time and then start piling into the battery." What I do know As previously mentioned, I am entirely comfortable with most aspects of IT and in particular the following concepts: IT infrastructure and networking Software development - not Python but that won't be a hurdle using web APIs to both push and pull data I'm also fairly obviously familiar now with what bits of kit we have dotted around and what (at least in a basic sense) they do. What I don't know For someone with a career in technology, I'm also remarkably luddite in some areas. As a result, any discussion in those areas really needs to be basic until the penny drops and I can grasp the...

Page 4 / 4 Prev

Solar Photovoltaic (PV)

Last Post by Majordennisbloodnok 1 year ago

38 Posts

6 Users

10 Reactions

6,171 Views

RSS

Mars

(@editor)

Illustrious Member Admin

Joined: 4 years ago

Posts: 3357

07/03/2024 2:40 pm

@majordennisbloodnok 😂 that certainly is a post!

Buy Bodge Buster – Homeowner Air Source Heat Pump Installation Guide: https://amzn.to/3NVndlU
From Zero to Heat Pump Hero: https://amzn.to/4bWkPFb

Subscribe and follow our Homeowners’ Q&A heat pump podcast

ReplyQuote

Majordennisbloodnok

(@majordennisbloodnok)

Noble Member Moderator

Joined: 4 years ago

Posts: 881

Topic starter 07/03/2024 2:44 pm

Posted by: @editor

↑

@majordennisbloodnok 😂 that certainly is a post!

And there hangs the reason for posting. We didn't set out to create an all singing all dancing integrated system; we just wanted to lower the impact of our energy consumption. The post lays out the logical progression that took us from original starting point to where we are now. My guess is that there will be a lot of people whose story over a couple of years from deciding to go more renewable will in some way mirror our home's evolution.

105 m2 bungalow in South East England
Mitsubishi Ecodan 8.5 kW air source heat pump
18 x 360W solar panels
1 x 6 kW GroWatt battery and SPH5000 inverter
1 x Myenergi Zappi
1 x VW ID3
Raised beds for home-grown veg and chickens for eggs

"Semper in excretia; sumus solum profundum variat"

ReplyQuote

Page 4 / 4 Prev

26 Forums
2,111 Topics
46.4 K Posts
13 Online
3,402 Members

Forum Icons: Forum contains no unread posts Forum contains unread posts

Topic Icons: Not Replied Replied Active Hot Sticky Unapproved Solved Private Closed

RE: No-code, plug-and-play monitoring for your heat pump

@benson It is a shame, I was looking at these when I wa...

By Grantmethestrength , 4 hours ago
RE: BUS Grant: removal of all other fossil fuel heat sources

@rikiarn - just have a think as to how much it will cos...

By Transparent , 4 hours ago
RE: Cost to have Gas removed

Don't do much digging around.That's best left to the pr...

By Transparent , 5 hours ago
Ideal Heat Pump DHW settings

Hi all, I was wondering if anyone had an idea of how th...

By Wh0am3ye , 7 hours ago
RE: EBAC re-entering the ASHP market in 2023

@toodles confirm i have Ebac 5kw ASAP + homely and it w...

By marcinwloch69@gmail.com , 9 hours ago
RE: Compute heat loss from energy used

@jamespa Ebac must be similar to Mitsubishi as they buy...

By marcinwloch69@gmail.com , 9 hours ago
RE: Is a Valliant Inline 6kW heater a BUS buster?

When i was looking I encountered one installer who does...

By JamesPa , 10 hours ago
RE: Daikin - octopus -cooling

@pie_eater I have been thinking of adding cooling to my...

By TechnoGeek , 2 days ago
RE: Victorian Semi Retrofit / Extension ASHP and UFH Advice

Agree, but you may have a hard time convincing them, as...

By JamesPa , 4 days ago
RE: Seal the Deal: Don't Let Your Heat Pump Leak Energy

Hi - fyi - there's a dead image link in the 'Optimal In...

By seatonian , 4 days ago
RE: Ripped Off: How UK Homeowners Are Paying Gas Prices for Wind Energy

@chandykris Horses and beggars…. 😉 Toodles.

By Toodles , 4 days ago
RE: Cleaning up after gas meter removed

@agentgeorge Likewise in the loft space; we have 300mm ...

By Toodles , 4 days ago
RE: Ecodan consuming 100kwh per day in new build!!!

This particular example is one of the worst I have seen...

By JamesPa , 5 days ago
RE: Home energy storage & battery register

@old_scientist 😊 Toodles

By Toodles , 5 days ago
RE: Fan running in hot weather ...why?

I wonder if it has some kind of pressure transducer to ...

By ASHP-BOBBA , 5 days ago
RE: Cooling with Samsung Gen6 and Flow error

@iaack The system isnt running long enough for any cond...

By EcoBaker , 5 days ago
RE: Failed install (initial SCOP1.8), clueless installer compounded by poor manufacturer support. Help needed desperately!

@heacol thanks for confirming we can only hope NAPIT ag...

By Bart , 6 days ago
RE: Homely Smart Controller

Sorry to hear that @bruce. Sadly I’ve heard from multip...

By Mars , 1 week ago

Forums

Local monitoring and control of inverter - gaps in understanding

Join Us!

RHH Awards

Latest Posts

Members Online