Long story short, in case anyone else has bought one - my iStore IS-GYB-5000-1PH hybrid solar inverter does work by using the Huawei Solar integration.
While I knew when buying it that iStore has become the licensed outlet for Huawei inverters and batteries in Australia, I had been a little nervous about how many changes they might make to make it incompatible with the existing Huawei Solar integration - and I couldn’t find any concrete examples of people being able to connect these iStore inverters to Home Assistant. It looks like these worries were unfounded, and it works fine.
As far as I can tell (and others are already aware of this), this inverter specifically is a rebranded Huawei SUN2000-5KTL-L1. The setup process is essentially the same as described on the Huawei Solar github page. For me specifically, once the inverter was connected to my home WiFi network, the successful settings were:
IP Address: (the local IP address of the inverter on my home network, found via my router config page) Port:6607 Slave ID:1 Username:installer Password:0000000a
Some notes:
You can access the same commissioning interface that the installer uses by downloading the “HiSolar” app by Qidianhd on Android, and logging in as “Installer” with the default password of 0000000a. I assume there’s something similar for iOS. Be careful with this, as a lot of the settings in here could be damaging, or violate how your energy provider requires the inverter to be connected.
I think for the integration to work you need to have “Local O+M” turned on in “Set”>“Communication Configuration”->“Router Settings” (this enables the modbus TCP port). Annoyingly, even entering this “Router Settings” page disconnects the inverter from your home WiFi network, and you need to reenter the password and allow it to connect again before you leave it.
This commissioning interface is where you can change the inverter WiFi AP password if it’s still the default Changeme. Mine was…which was not great.
I’ve been using the data from this integration to feed the energy-flow-card-plus card. Some values appeared to be inverted, but the settings for the card allow you to “invert state” on each entity, which fixes it without messing with templates or anything.
Thanks heaps for sharing, super helpful to know as I’m considering an iStore inverter. Aside from HA integration, I wonder if there is access via a native app or web UI to view the more technical parameters of the inverter over and above power and energy figures, like DC and AC voltages and currents, temperature, etc? I have found info on Huawei’s fusion solar app which looks pretty full-fledged (very good) - do you know if you can use an iStore inverter with the FusionSolar app?
Just tried it now, and no - I can’t get the FusionSolar app to work. Its main interface requires a login created by the installer, and I’m assuming iStore isn’t going to be registering with the FusionSolar system. The iStore equivalent is the Universe EMS app, but that doesn’t provide quite as much information as the Home Assistant Huawei integration. While it works well enough, my main annoyance with it is that the data is slow - it depends on the inverter reporting to their server somewhere, which it only does every few minutes. By comparison, the Huawei integration in HA is communicating directly with the inverter over the local network, so is both faster and doesn’t rely on an internet connection.
Thank you so much for the confirmation. I’ve just purchased and istore 5kw inverter and 10kwH battery to be installed in the next month.
Can you please tell me if the Istore WLAN dongle (WLAN Dongle - iStore) was required to setup this integration with Home assistant. Or does it have the required hardware already inside it to connect?
I have recently had mine installed, but they also installed a Voltello dongle (Village energy) that the inverter seems to talk to. Has anyone got this to work with the dongle/setup? Or can I still connect directly to the inverter?
Thanks for this info. I am in NZ and Huawei is sold under a different brand name here. I am going to try to set up Home Assistant access over the weekend using this info for my inverter. I will report back…
Has anyone here encountered severe interference in the 2.4GHz Wifi with this inverter? I can use the router to isolate the inverter which disallows HA connecting to it…
My WiFi connection to it has been solid for the year or so I’ve had it. It’s about 10m and 3 brick walls away from the WiFi access point. It’s not happy about the signal strength (around -82dBm), but it’s never been bad enough to cause a problem.
On another note - last month I realised that the entire inverter had turned off (and had been for over a week). Rebooting it didn’t help, but through the HA integration I was able to see the state as “Command: Shutdown”. Not real sure what had caused this (possibly a command from the power utility, and I’d missed the corresponding start one?), but through the integration I was able to toggle it back on again - all working now.