If you know your inverters IP you can have HA look at the modbus registers to get the data you need.
Some of you will have seen the liquidation discussion above. I learned that the liquidator was selling the customer database to the highest bidder, which raised concerns about who would be responsible for supporting existing customers. The short version from my side is that I emailed the liquidator twice to ask what provision was being made for hardware support, repairs, parts and warranty. Neither email got a reply. I sent a registered letter after that, and it got an email back. The reply I received was that no meaningful provision was being made for ongoing hardware support. I had also been given the chance to opt out of the customer database sale and had not taken it, because at that point I was not ready to give up a cloud managed system. Generation figures, consumption patterns and my address were all in there, being sold as an asset.
What I had not realised until I went looking is that the cloud was only ever a middleman. My inverter appears to be a rebadged Solis, and underneath the branding there is a standard Modbus interface. The COM port is a proprietary 4 pin connector and there is only one of them, so the Autarco WiFi stick had to come out to free it. I bought the plug on eBay.de and soldered my own cable onto it. RS485 A and B on pins 3 and 4, ground on pin 2. https://ebay.io/m/2rMHiV
From there it is RS485 straight into Home Assistant using the SolaX Modbus integration, which supports Solis hybrids. Fully local. No cloud, no API key, no account, nothing leaving the house. GitHub - wills106/homeassistant-solax-modbus: SolaX Power Modbus custom_component for Home Assistant (Supports some AlphaESS, Growatt, Sofar, Solinteg, Solis, SRNE, Swatten) · GitHub
Adapter: https://amzn.eu/d/0aiCO6Da
What that actually gets you, which is the part I did not expect:
- 14 sensors became more than 160.
- Update rate of every 15 seconds, against 5 minute rows from the cloud.
- Battery state of charge, which the portal never exported at all.
- Precision of 0.1 kWh on daily counters and 0.01 kWh on meter totals. The portal gave 1 kWh resolution.
- Per string production, so my east and west arrays report separately. Autarco only ever gave one combined figure.
- House load.
- Inverter temperature.
- Battery state of health, voltage and current.
- Grid meter lifetime totals.
- Writable controls are exposed as well, so timed charge windows, battery control override, minimum SoC and the inverter clock are all reachable from automations. I am still working through what is there.
- All 15 months of history came across and still sits on the same charts.
So I gave up nothing by leaving. I had been paying in data for a worse version of what the hardware already gave away for free.
One thing local access does not fix. My data had already gone to the buyer, and rewiring does not reach back and undo that. I sent a GDPR erasure request separately. Insolvency does not suspend data protection rights. A company can sell a customer database as an asset, but the people in it keep the right to be erased, and that right follows the data to whoever holds it now.
The general point is not really about solar. Most connected kit in a house has a local interface the vendor does not advertise, because their portal is the product and the hardware is the loss leader. While the company is trading you can ignore that. When it fails, it is the difference between owning your data and finding out who bought it.
