GoodWe GW10K-ET Plus - experience, fully LAN-only internet-less functionality?

Energy
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Hello, our local installer recommends GoodWe products due to their good experience they have with their supplier, and it’s their primary choice unless customer demands something else.

Specifically, they provided us pricing of solution which uses GoodWe GW10K-ET Plus as solar inverter.

Does someone have experience with it? And:

  • does it integrate well with HA?
  • does it function okay, if it’s on a separate subnet (on a different isolated VLAN) needing routing between the inverter and other software/clients?
  • does it function in fully internetless (V)LAN setup?
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Just my experience, with an eight year old three phase GoodWe DT series inverter setup. No batteries.

I think it uses UDP rather than TCP to communicate back to home base.

The GoodWe SEMS website shows the collected statistics for your inverter, presented as different graphs, etc, on a daily, monthly, and yearly basis. The app for your phone is quite useful to show the generation graphs by days, months, years, and the gradual reduction in performance of your solar cells as well as the cycles of seasons and climate peaks and troughs, as your statistics accumulate over the years. The data can also be exported from SEMS as csv files, and easily uploaded into spreadsheets or databases for analysis and storage. The update period is around five to eight minutes for each data payload. Different countries and regions have their data stored in different data centres, viz Europe in Europe, Asia in China, US in AWS. (This may have changed lately so don’t quote me on this)

Vendor support and API documentation for hobbyist HomeAssistant integration is very poor, and some have attempted to reverse engineer the protocols with varying success, intercepting the traffic carrying the data. Others just scrape the vendors SEMS website every few minutes, and funnel the data into HomeAssistant, directly or using MQTT. Isolating the data flow from the internet may affect your electricity suppliers from load shedding in time of high sunlight and regulating battery charging. Do a search on GitHub to see many active, (and even more abandoned) GoodWe packages, and examine the issues/problems reported with each package. Even the official HomeAssistant GoodWe integration is not 100% reliable.

Rather than the WiFi option, consider the Modbus/RS485/LAN option where you can listen in and take control of all the statistics in a controlled, reliable manner. It is YOUR data, not the vendors, and cutting ties from the Chinese manufacturer is seen by some as highly desirable.

Firmware updates are rare, but done remotely over the internet, rather than your installer coming onsite. The options for configuration to suit many countries and electrical requirements is quite broad.

As your installers have found, the inverters themselved are solidly built, efficient, quiet, and perform well, and present value for money. Keep them out of the severe heat and cold inside your garage or shed, and you should get many years of faultless performance from them.

You could do a lot worse, and there are vendors that actually listen to their customers and give them what they want, gratefully accepting their money. GoodWe are not top or bottom in this scale. Discuss your options with your installers

1 Like
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Thank you for the elaborate reply.

It is not too expensive compared to other brands being recommended as having good quality and good integration to HA. So, not being open-source integration-friendly,… trade-offs,…

The installer mentioned, that he has it integrated with Loxone. So, probably there should be ways.

Security side:

I don’t like to provide 24/7 access to internet to random device(s) in my home.

It has a potential of being a backdoor to my LAN. Slowly scanning other devices for vulnerabilities to exploit.

Or, being a bot in a botnet, though maybe more passive than active, and processing just few small commands a day. Occasionally participate in a larger attack.

So, I’d like to put it on its own VLAN, different subnet. Does Android client work fine in such cases? And, HA integration?

Maybe, once I’ll setup IDS/IPS solution.

Options

Installer mentioned, that they would(had) install(ed) other brands/models if asked for by customer.

What would you suggest, if you could choose?

Europe, Slovakia, 230V/50Hz, similarly expensive. Initially 3kW, and later some expansion maybe.

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My experience with GoodWe GW10K-ET is it has a very good local integration with HA.
I do not use any cloud services provided by Goodwe.
I think you can block it from calling back home, if that is what you want - internetless setup - it should not affect the functioning of inverter.

1 Like
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Thanks. It sounds great, exactly like what I want.

So, I’ll proceed with this model.

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Any WiFi can have vulnerabilities. It is a risk you take for convenience, and to save on a few metres of copper wire.

Sounds like you want to be specific and deliberately omit the WiFi option, but go for the inbuilt RS485/MODBUS option in your GoodWe, and hard wire it locally to keep your data local in HomeAssistant only. Seeing your data on SEMS is nice, and your installer may push you to do this so they can monitor your system is working correctly during the warranty period, as any errors are also transmitted back to SEMS.

Handy hints: 1. You don’t have to poll your inverter every nanosecond to collect real time data! Overloading the internal processor that has firmware that is designed to report every few minutes will cause grief.
2. Don’t forget to terminate your RS485 wiring only on both ends and nowhere between. 120ohms is the standard, and sometimes it has an inbuilt DIP switch or shunt jumper selection on the circuit board. The termination provides for reliable long distance transmission of over 1000 metres with less errors and crosstalk.
3. Buy a RS485 adapter on your end that has isolation. It is basically a UART serial adapter with voltage translation, and the optoisolator isolation will prevent ground loops and electrical surges from killing your equipment, or the GoodWe. An USB to RS485 isolated adapter should only cost you about $10-$15 off eBay - you dont need a multiport WaveShare device with multiple connectors and protocols - USB one side and wiring screw terminals on the other. Check that the USB serial chip is supported by whatever operating system you are plugging it into. Avoid devices that come with a fake FDTI chip and a tiny driver CDROM (that always gets folded in half during postage!). You should be able to plug it in and the operating system to recognise it right away and automatically install the correct drivers.
4. Running your serial chip at faster speeds will not make it more reliable (quite the opposite), or get you more data. Use the same speed for all devices to be able to talk to each other. This is the most common mistake that beginners make and can result in many wasted hours of troubleshooting - they HAVE to match. Your installer will let you know what the GoodWe defaults to. Often 9600bps, 8N1.
5. RS485 is the electrical specification for your wiring, and supports very long runs of cable error free. MODBUS is the software communication protocol that talks over it. Both are well known and widely used together in industrial control. Make sure to get your drivers correctly installed for the serial port chip in the RS485 adaoter to work with your hardware and software (Windows/Mac/Linux/HAOS), and get the MODBUS port number your GoodWe is set to by your installer, so you can address the correct device in software. Each device on the RS485 chain must have an unique number.

The beauty is that different devices can be daisy chained to one RS485 connection, and then individually addressed by software using the MODBUS protocol. Add another inverter, or a battery system that has RS485/MODBUS support? No problems - just allocate it a different MODBUS port during installation and all will be well.

It sounds harder than it really is. Just read the instructions carefully, wire it all up, plug it in, and put in the correct parameters, and it should work reliably for many years. They run refineries, spacecraft, refrigeration, and power stations using this combination, all installed by apprentices just out of school, so you should be right!

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Upon further research, it looks like WiFi is bundled, and LAN/ethernet is extra add on.

Maybe, I’ll start with WiFi (separate SSID/VLAN) and switch to ethernet eventually.

Yes, that’s the goal. And, at least, I want to have this option.

Sometimes cloud is okay, and sometimes vendors make anti-consumer choices - impair existing functionality - enshitification.

Or, maybe, I’ll go straight with RS485/MODBUS.

Based on your description, it looks like a solid choice. And, better than ethernet/LAN?

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I went with the wired LAN adapter, paid around 80 EUR extra and it is functioning very well. It is a drop-in replacement, so no need to rebuild integration if and when you decide to add it.

Also, do study integration options, because RS485/MODBUS and LAN integrations are vastly different.

If you decide to put inverter in a separate subnet/VLAN please be advised in the first step to achieve fully functional integration and only then migrate to a separate subnet.

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Just an additional experience for those finding this thread:
I have a GW20K connected to a “guest” WiFi, with the HA machine also having a connection via a secondary USB WiFi stick. The “guest” network has no internet access. Inverter firmware updates can be done with the Goodwe SolarGo App (connected to the inverter via Bluetooth, connected to the internet via normal WiFi). This setup works.

I did connect the inverter to the normal WiFi a few times, when I had support questions. There I had an issue with the “WIFI KIT” dongle, which frequently lost the server connection, if HA was querying the inverter as well. I got sent a “WIFI/LAN KIT 2.0” by Goodwe last week, which seems to have fixed that issue.

The inverter is generally good for the money. I do have two current issues with the inverter though.
The first one (since the beginning) is that the PV currents the inverter measures/reports on two indentical strings (7kWp each) can deviate by up to two amps. This is a measurement error and not a string problem. Sometimes I have more grid export than reported PV power, which is impossible, since I don’t have a battery.
The second one, which appeared two month ago (I think after a firmware update), is that the inverter switches off the backup output relay for a minute every day when solar generation hits zero.
Goodwe support is good though and usually responds within a day (at least in Germany).