I have just bought my first home and will be completing exchange soon. One of the first things I will be getting installed is solar.
Does anyone have any recommendations on which brands work best with home assistant? I am in NSW if that has any relevance.
I know nothing about what options are available for solar but a big thing for me is going to be home assistant integration.
Thanks in advance!
SMA Solar is Ok.
The SunnyBoy inverter works well and reports the generated solar energy well locally to Home Assistant (by wifi or wired Ethernet) however their Energy Meter (required for determining grid feed in) is a piece of crap. Massive errors in the values compared to my energy supplier’s meter. I ended up replacing it with an IoTaWatt.
I suspect the might be the cart before the horse, and I would look at what solar, or more specifically what inverter which is the things that might or might not integrate with HA. Then once you have a preference on that, you can look at if that inverter integrates into HA or not. I suspect most these days will have some sort of option, whether build in or not. And even if they don’t you are probably mostly interested in is :
With these 2 measures, you can get household consumption with some simple maths. The good news is, that even if solar inverter does not have HA integration, 1 or 2 commodity meters will provide that. Tom_I mentions IoTaWatt (though I suspect that might be harder to buy now??). But there are lots of other options. I like Iammeters. eg if you have single phase, one of these would do the job (2 if 3 phase) :
Or if you are just happy in HA, all you need is 1 of these (or 2 for 3 phase) :
Difference is cheaper on does not have Iammeter’s club platform which is not too bad built in. But I think you can try the cheaper one, with a trial of the cloud platform. And purchase a license if you want later.
Another option would be Shelly. But again, pick you solar inverter 1st, as it will probably have it.
HOWEVER, in Australia, you might want to consider adding a battery. So that could become important. And the batteries integration in HA is probably more important. I have Sigenergy battery, and that is know for its HA integration, which I suspect is as good as it gets. Not only can you get the data, but you have a good level of control via ModbusTCP and HA integrations pretty simply. I suspect most vendors will have some level of integration. But mileage will vary. Sigenergy is a powerful solutions with a LOT of flexibility to meet a broad range of requirements you might or might not have. But there are downsides. From my point of view, it is NOT the most “efficient” architecture due to design tradeoffs that made on the side of power and flexibility. And it is also not the cheapest battery out there (the power and flexibility come at a price). So again, I would have HA integration on your shopping list if you are interested in that sort of thing for sure. But I would shortlist the batteries you like based on other requirements, and bring this in later.
Goodwe inverters integrate with HA.