Growatt Shine WiLan X2 integrated into Home Assistant - Easy Solution

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Hi, not sure if this is really the right place for this, so please move it if it isn’t.

This isn’t so much a cool project or addon, rather using things that exist to make a Growatt Inverter work. I searched for hours before finding this, so thought it would be useful to add a post.

I have now had 3 growatt invertors and got them all to work with Home Assistant, mainly using Grott which has been an excellent HACS addon for me. But my latest upgrade was an SPL-5000 TL HUB which comes with the newer Shine-WiLan-x2 dongle the absolutely doesn’t work with Grott as the new Shine X series use a different comms protocol with the Growatt Servers and Grott doesn’t understand it, it doesn’t even use the same port, so no logs or anything show up in Grott when you change the monitoring IP in the Growatt server website application. :weary:

I looked around and came across things for the Shine-WiLan-X that cover things like re-flashing the module, adding ESP devices and messing around with Modbus to IP configurations, hardware alterations etc. Too messy for me.

Then I came across a white paper from Growatt showing that the Shine-WiLan-X2 actually contains a ModBus to TCP interpreter, and it works out of the box. Whilst trying to get this to work with the inbuilt ModBus for Home Assistant (which does work BTW) I came across the SolaX Inverter Modbus HACS plugin. This is for SolaX inverters, but also handily supports Growatt too. This leads to a super simple solution.

Installation:
Find the IP address of your Shine-WiLan-X2 on the local network, you will probably need to look at the DHCP on your router for the MAC, mine started f0:24:f9 - Its host name was the serial of the dongle, would look something like VWQ0ABC0JK. I would HIGHLY recommend you then set a reservation for it do it doesn’t change in the future. You could also set the dongle to a static IP, but that’s a bit of a faff to be honest with the X2, but there are videos online if you want to do this.

In HACS search for the “SolaX Inverter Modbus” and install it

Add the integration and add the invertor, make sure you select “Select Inverter Type” as Growatt, Interface as “TCP / Ethernet”, give it a sensible name.
On the next screen put in the IP address of the Shine-WiLAN-X2 that you got earlier. leave the port as 502 and the default “Modbus TCP”

Click submit

That’s it, you then get a full feed of all the Growatt data, updated every 15 seconds over the local network without needing the cloud at all. You also get to control many aspects of the invertor including altering scheduling, operating mode etc etc, just as sliders and buttons.

Hope this helps other people

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Thanks, am a grott user myself and just for completeness, you donot need the cloud when using grott, that is the whole idea behind grott.

Can you tell if this setup is providing more data than via grott?
What I like most is having the inverter control elements. Also noted that the Shine-WiLan-X2 can be found for about 30EUR (up to a lot more) which is quite a bit cheaper than my old one.

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A bit more data than Grott, but main advantage is the ease of setup.
15 seconds polling (or even less if you want), Grott is 5min, or 1min if you fiddle)
Plus the ability to write data back to the invertor, so you can programmatically change battery charging speeds or grid modes

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And no additional software in the middle that depends on model settings… seems another win (compared to grott sometimes now showing all), really appreciating the feedback !

Just to be clear, for me grott has been super stable for almost 3y except for 2 days where due to unknown reason it needed a restart.

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Update this morning, appears SolaX crashed during the night, possibly, rebooted HA and all running again, not sure if this is going to be a recurring thing

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Hmmm, that is not helping my earlier reduced risk statement :rofl: Any idea of the cause? Just to be clear, there are plenty integrations that faulter at times, e.g. my netatmo being the biggest pita. But locally run add-ons/integrations should be stable.