SolarLOG - how to get rid of, and why this is important (at least to me)

Hardware
1

Hi guys,
let me first of all summarize what happend, starting with a short overview of my smart home setup:

  • SolarLOG 500, addressing 4 SMA inverters installed 2013 (this will become important in a minute)
  • HomeAssistant at the heart of it all
  • openWB2duo wallbox (FOSS) with 2 charging points and direct SolarLOG integration
  • a bunch of Shelly devices to make my home smarter than me

History of events:

  • after ~12 years of operation the SolarLOG started to first miss out on his daily performance reporting emails. No worries, have that in HomeAssistant. I thought.
  • then, the actual energy readouts (PV power, grid power, home consumption etc.) no longer came in 30-second intervals but, only every 30 minutes. That clearly ruins any kind of control loop for your wallbox or heat pump…
  • So, I contatced SolarLOG support to ask for a solution / cause for this behaviour (bad microSD card, config, …?)
  • The blunt answer was: “We offer some bucks for hand-in of your old device when buying a new, actual one!” That’s it…
  • But, some bright mind had switched the business model of SolarLOG to - you might guess it already - service and cloud oriented with monthly fees and no local portal on your own HTTP-server or such. Printing money, digital age. No offline-capability.

As this is contrary to a lot of constraints and rules that apply here (offline, no external data or control, no cloud, no monthly fees, open interfaces, open configuration, I own the passwords - stuff like that) I took following decisions:

  • Don’t buy this new stuff from SolarLOG
  • Check whether it is a simple data overload. 12 years of data - who can expect that some guy really uses a product for such a long time?
    I simply deleted the entire data history in the unit and - guess what - system is now back to a performance I had before! Btw., support did not mention this…
  • Get rid of the SolarLOG and replace it entirely with HomeAssistant

The next steps will be to:

  • directly integrate the inverters to HomeAssistant
  • transfer remaining control loops into HomeAssistant
  • re-route any power metering to the wallbox (the Shelly pro3EM will do this)

In a nutshell:
Slow SolarLOG? Clear the data!
Pay monthly fees to SolarLOG? Switch to Shelly and HomeAssistant!

I will keep you posted on my proceedings…

2 Likes
2

On the road to full enshitification. :money_mouth_face:

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(Profit obviously for the solar-log company :face_with_hand_over_mouth:)

We are literally at the point were you can’t be even sure that your (now offline working) device will continue working offline if you don’t have full local control and ownership! :person_shrugging:

Many things nowadays are branded to work offline, take matter certified devices, in reality even these ones technically contain a half baked kill switch (making re-deplyoing impossible?) and can in general also only be deployed after contacting the cloud (other people computers) and get the permit to enroll :cloud: