Hey all,
I’m getting solar shortly. No battery as it’s way too expensive right now.
but I’m getting a pretty large array… and was wondering if it’s possible for home assistant to be able to control if I export or not on an inverter based on the rules and costs of export tariff.
For example, if the export is negative, I would like to not export and perhaps turn on some appliances in my home like my other tile heating to offset it.
The inverter I’m looking at are sungrow and fronius
Thanks
No problem with Fronius. Id recommend to buy their Smartmeter too - it’s not expensive and gives you a lot of data you can use in HA and it’s native UI and it’s cloud service (Solar.web).
You don’t even need HA or anything to do basic load management. The inverter (Symo at least) has some IO Ports that can be controlled based on export values.
Ah, great to know. Thank you very much. I went down the rabbit hole over the last 2 weeks on solar. Good fun
But you can actually control them from HA if you want to?
The SMA Sunnyboy inverters work reasonably well with home assistant. However their smart meter (which is required to determine grid import/export) is incerdibly inaccurate. They even admit as much in their documentation. I will be replacing this with an IoTaWatt later this year.
I don’t have one but I have seen two reports on the forum of Fronius inverters having an issue where they start up first thing in the morning with the full daily energy from yesterday still set.
So they go:
Some total → 0 (overnight) → Some total (start up in the morning) → 0 reset for the daily
This plays havoc with the energy dashboard.
No, Fronius API is read-only. May be different with ModbusTCP but don’t know myself.
What would you like to control in an inverter?
This is most likely a configuration issue (wrong entity used in HA energy dashboard. Do you have links to these? (I wrote the Fronius integration)
Ah ok. Weather it’s exporting or not. And then I can turn on power hungry devices in home with ha to offset it
I don’t think you can control any inverter to stop exporting… (without batteries).
You can however control devices based on export power, but these would be other integrations.
The internal IO Ports of a Fronius Symo inverter can not be controlled via API, these are just configurable via the inverters web Ui afaik.
Here’s one of the ones I was thinking of: Energy dashboard not populating - #7 by tom_l
It’s a Growatt inverter, not Fronius. Sorry for the misinformation
Sure you can. It is called frequency shifting and Fronius can do that. I’m not sure that it can be done through the Solar API, probably you need to use modbus.