I present to you here a solar router project based entirely on ESPHome and therefore 100% compatible with Home Assistant.
A few months ago, I found on a French site F1ATB a solar router which is very versatile and propose for example to separate energy sensor from the router itself or to use different kind of regulator. Unfortunately, this router was not so adapted to Home Assistant.
I then came across another French the project by Rem81 based on ESPHome, which is well adapted to Home Assistant but lacks the versatility of F1ATB.
Could we marry the two worlds?
Well, yes, we can, so here is the project Solar-Router-for-ESPHome:
This project proposes to build a solar router with very few components (user’s choice) and assemble the software that corresponds in a few lines.
You can build a solar router with:
- 1 x ESP32
- 1 x SSR relay
- 2 x LEDs + resistors
- 1 x phone USB power supply
And configure it in 15 lines added at the end of a yaml file.
Here, for example, is the configuration that allows controlling this relay from energy measurements made by a Fronius inverter:
substitutions:
power_meter_ip_address: "192.168.1.21"
regulator_gate_pin: GPIO22
green_led_pin: GPIO19
yellow_led_pin: GPIO18
packages:
power_meter:
url: https://github.com/XavierBerger/Solar-Router-for-ESPHome/
file: solar_router/power_meter_fronius.yaml
regulator:
url: https://github.com/XavierBerger/Solar-Router-for-ESPHome/
file: solar_router/regulator_relay.yaml
solar_router:
url: https://github.com/XavierBerger/Solar-Router-for-ESPHome/
file: solar_router/solar_router_engine.yaml
Please refer to the documentation for more details on installation and operation and to see, for example, how to move the measurement to an ESP8266 that can be installed near the meter while the router will be installed next to the water heater.
However, please note: The project is very young and has limitations. The first and not the least is the energy sensor, which currently only supports Fronius inverters using a SmartMeter. But the project is designed to adapt to any type of energy sensor and any type of regulator, so if you are a developer, feel free to propose a Pull Request on the GitHub project to add new energy sensors or new regulator.
Enjoy reading the doc and feel free to share your comments and remarks that will help advance this project.