I have been using the official HA Growatt integration for the past months, but lately I have been on a quest to make my HA work completely offline as much as possible. I discovered my Samsung and Bosch appliances could run without internet and the next step was to make my solar inverter do the same!
Grott is available, and it is very nice, but to run in HA requires to run as an app, with docker, and there are no official or consistently supported projects that provided a full offline experience, Grott itself looks unmaintained and does not have a license so it can’t be forked either.
I decided to write a new HA integration from scratch to make this happen, it runs as a simple HACS custom component, no dependencies, no Docker, no MQTT, and it works completely offline out of the box, with the option to forward the data to Growatt servers in case someone wants to use their app.
I also published the underlying python library that communicates with the inverter so that anybody can use it for other purposes as they need. Everything MIT (and partially, Apache) licensed!
I have a ShineLan-X and it’s an hassle to flash, but I don’t mind since with this integration I have everything local anyway without any addons or anything annoying.
I have grott running for 3 years and never had any issues, yes it is not 1-2-3 to install for not-so-techies but it works stable (for me).
Could you possibly explain any differences (i.e. pro’s) in detail as my decision on switching integrations also includes the decision to continue the statistics and that could be quite a bit of work so I want to understand what I can gain vs. my effort.
The main advantage is that it works completely offline, it does not need to talk to the growatt servers. Grott still needs that, even with Grott Server there are bugs that make it not working. There are also other bugs that made it drop once in a while. And this one does not need mqtt, or docker
My integration also provides all the sensors and controls to configure the inverter without any extra configuration.
Also the ShineX reflash will be 100% local.
I did notice however that the Solax integration did offer way more details than the original growatt as well as the grott integration
I understand and I’m happy you like your solution, but this post is about a different way to connect to the inverter.
Not everyone are comfortable tinkering with hardware, connecting jumpers, and flashing firmwares. My solution allows to get a fully local solution clicking a button.
