With the historical data saving of SunPower going away, I integrated my PVS6 into HA today. Getting NAT through the firewall was the only little hiccup I had, but once sorted out, everything was a breeze.
I am concerned though about the available free space. Since connecting my HA to the PVS6 a little less than 4 hours ago, my memory usage has gone up and my free space down.
I’m assuming that disabling all the individual panels (I have 25) would help reduce the queries, as well as increase the polling to 300 seconds. Both of which I just did.
Should I be concerned over this usage? I don’t want to “rainbow” my monitor. Any way to reset the counters, clear the memory or increase the space?
I just got the network VLAN setup so I can talk to the PVS6, now just trying to read and absorb any info I can before setting the Integration up. I have 30 panels, and hoping to at least get some data tracking, even once a day just to make sure they are working since Sunstrong is going to start charging for that kind of data, and I really don’t want to break something, this whole solar install thing was a nightmare to even get completed, then they go bankrupt right after.
Sorry to hear your install was a nightmare @sam65. Now that you have the VLAN set up, integrating the data into your HA is a piece of cake. Once you get Keith Baker’s integration installed, you literally just point it at the IP address of the PVS system. Then everything gets ingested and you can start monitoring/graphing what you want.
For me, I used the historical data of production and consumption to help see what my solar offset is. I have two different PV arrays, so I put the data into a sheet and track it that way. But with Sunstrong charging for this now, I needed a different way. I set my HA up to export both my PV array data into Influx2 and then used Grafana to generate the graphs at an hourly, daily, monthly, yearly interval. Learning the query language for Influx was probably the hardest part. Lots of trial and error and request from AI. But it’s all set now.
And then the Flash Availability freaked me out that I would burn through the PVS’s memory fast. I’m thrilled to say that this morning the availability had jumped up. In this left graph you can barely make out the downward slope from before 4 PM to just after 8 PM. That was my screenshot from my previous post. Then just before 4 AM today it made almost 10 Mb available. These eased my mind and I’m looking forward to watching my data over time. Huge thanks to @Keith_Baker for this integration.
Thanks for the reply. I’m still consuming info out there on all this, has anyone tried putting a bigger SD card in their PVS6? I found another site with a bunch of info and screenshots (probably originally found in this thread) where there is clearly an SD card on the board of the PVS6. SD Cards are super cheap, even for large ones.
No, I did not attempt it, just had mentioned it. I have disabled the integration as it just seems buggy, stops working about once a week, memory use doesn’t seem to free up and I’m afraid to kill my PVS by filling it’s memory
The project looks like it’s been pretty much abandoned on Github with the author going to Enphase monitoring.
Just wanted to thank everyone that contributed to this thread. I was not happy that Sunstrong is going to start charging $10/mo for history data. I have SRECs I get credit for and need to report production monthly. With all the great information provided here, I purchased a GLiNet ($30 on Amazon’s) and installed home assistant on my synology NAS and had system up and running in two days. Have access to so much more information than the BS Sunpower app. I did set the polling rate to 3600 sec to mitigate concerns with memory. Thanks again. Cheers.
I have relatively old controller with LAN port. After today’s update to build 2025.4 I lost LAN connection, I can’t ping 172.27.152.1 anymore. The application still works, but I’m about to loose per-panel data. Rebooting didn’t solve the local access problem.
Anyone has similar setup with the LAN port? Did you have the same local network problem, and if yes, how did you fix it?
PVS6 came back on local LAN however it doesn’t provide individual inventors’ data, like power, voltage, etc. Only the “state” is reported as either “working” or “error”
Did they disable this capability?
I can connect to it and ping it with a glinet ar300m travel router, but it will not respond to any polling requests to the API
All the changes with Sun Power and the emails threatening loss of access to data convinced me to try and set this up. Following the instructions on this thread for the GL.iNet mini router was quite simple and I was suddenly very happy with all the data available to HA. It worked for about 2 months. Then in mid April it stopped working. I’ve been futzing around with it ever since and still cannot get it working again. My two theories at this point are that either Sun Strong did a remote update to intentionally cripple access over the installer port, or my mini-router glitched/died. Anyone else having trouble? Have you found solutions? Here are my notes so far:
The PVS6 no longer shows up as a client in on the mini-router.
If I remove the mini-router from the PVS6 and plug it into my laptop ethernet port, the laptop shows up as a client.
If I connect the laptop ethernet port to the PVS6 installer port, it connects. I can query the PVS6 with http://172.27.153.1/cgi-bin/dl_cgi?Command=DeviceList and get a long list of devices and states of each device. This gives me hope that the PVS6 has not been crippled.
I did a factory reset on the mini-router and reinstalled it in the PVS6. Still no clients listed on the router and no access in HA.
When I first set it up, I did not try to access the PVS6 by IP address from a web browser. Is there supposed to be a web interface to change settings? I cannot access one even from the a laptop connect to the installer port (but the cgi devicelist query does work). Why would the PVS6 be visible to the laptop, but not to the mini-router?
I think that my next step will be to try a replacement mini-router unless someone here has other advice.
Have you tried rebooting the PVS? Turn it off at the breaker box for a minute or two. I was never able to get this to work reliably, requiring rebooting the PVS6 regularly to resume getting data, which can’t be good for the health of that device. I first installed the integration in mid-March I think, I disabled it after a few weeks, but still remain hopeful they’ll fix some bugs with the firmware.
Yes. I tried power cycling the PVS6. I should probably try it a few more times before I give up.
With SunPower dead and SunStrong taking over, I have minimal hope that things will change for the better and some fears that they will intentionally cripple the installer port to increase subscriptions to their services.
Interesting. My integration has been working for a couple years now, needing a power cycle on the raspberry pi on the rare occasion when it would drop out, causing all the entities in hass to read as unavailable. A couple weeks ago, everything went dead and I have rebooted the pi multiple times with no luck.
I have no reason to believe the pi is bad, and the pvs6 is hard wired to my router and excluded from the Internet to preclude firmware updates.
I see the pi pop up on my network after rebooting, and i get (old) data readings, but then it drops off again shortly after.
I’ll try power cycling the pvs6, but if anyone else has any ideas I’d love to hear them! Last resort would be to finally bite the bullet and upgrade to enphase monitoring.
@yenemy Just curious - the last time you were able to pull data, what value did you see in “dl_flash_avail” ?
FWIW I have haproxy set up on a Pi Zero W and can hit the API but I’ve not been pulling data into Home Assistant due to concerns about flash memory exhaustion (discussed elsewhere). I’ve called the dl_cgi API manually exactly 2 times over the 7 days and the value has gone from 53749 on 5/12 to 52135 today (5/18).
@3rdStng what version of the PVS6 firmware are you on? And has your “dl_flash_avail” continued to rebound periodically? I’ve disabled HA monitoring due to concerns about this so am looking for input from others before i turn it back on…
I’m on 2025.4 build 61829 on the newer PVS6 (the one without a ethernet LAN port).
At the risk of speaking too soon and jinxing it… I’m back up and monitoring. I cannibalized an old RaspberryPi to replace the mini router and I’m getting data back into HA. We’ll see how long it lasts. It been working for just over 24 hours now.
I never figured out what was wrong with the mini router, but it simply refused to connect to the PVS6, or the PVS6 refused to connect with the mini router. A factory reset of the mini router didn’t fix it. I’m worried that the PVS6 now tracks data requests through the installer port and if there are too many for too long, it adds the mac address to a black list and will not connect. Either that, or the mini router broke in some way that only affects the PVS6 (connecting a laptop to the mini router worked just fine).
Thanks for the update @dos286 ! Let us know if it keeps working. My PVS6 power cycle didn’t work; I got some updated data sporadically for perhaps half a day, then it’s been dead since then.
I may try with another raspberry pi soon; failing that I will bite the bullet and go for the enphase replacement. I should probably have done that a while ago I suppose.
