Hi hive mind, I am going to be getting a sunamp Thermal Battery fitted, and wanted to know if anyone had experiance integrating it in to HA.
HA currently monitors and controls all my solar and battery stuff (Foxess) and I’d like toi be able to use it to dump excess solar into my thermal battery.
Ta in advance
Hi kris, I am also planning on getting a Sunamp and am looking to monitor the capacity and control when it charges. Sadly, like you, I haven’t found anything yet, but I will share anything I do find, and maybe we can try and work together ?
Regards
Ian
Hi @kristhelampie I am not getting a Sunamp anymore, so I won’t be trying to develop any monitoring for it. Whilst I would still happily offer to help you, my experience with HA is still limited, and there are many people far more knowledgable on this forum! Good Luck.
Hi Kris, I am fairly new to Home Assistant and am currently trying to choose between a Mixergy and a Sunamp direct electric hot water solution for my new build house. I plan to control the house with Home Assistant, so am currently erring towards the Mixergy given there seems to be more collective experience integrating it with Home Assistant…but I really like the Sunamp for the low thermal leakage and small form factor - so thought I’d check how you were getting on with integrating it into home assistant. I have also written to Sunamp for advice and will post any feedback I receive here.
Cheers
Adam
Also pondering a Sunamp, primarily due to size vs a full size tank.
Mixergy, well, I’d consider a standard tank to be more of a competitor for Mixergy than Sunamp. While the mixergy has a lot of smarts, the whole “You’ve got to connect to our service to run your hot water. I mean, how else can we offer Machine Learning for your hot water?” is a hard no for me.
The Sunamp electronics seem self-contained. There are some things to like - controls are just dry contacts, no need to worry about contactors or put 13a resistive through a smart switch. It seems to use a thermostat to device it’s “state of charge” and stop charging at a sensible point. Mixergy seems to has higher resolution through some metering of hot water added, theoretically you could add this yourself externally.
You’ve also got a non charging/charging 0-50%/charging 50-100%/full indicator via flashing lights on the control panel, which presumably you could read with an LDR Non-Invasive Power Meter - ESPHome - Smart Home Made Simple
Another thought. given the Sunamp has a phase change material and is measuring it’s SoC using only a thermostat, I bet it doesn’t actually know it’s SoC with any degree of accuracy.
The temperature will stay around the same while it’s getting it’s energy from the phase change. It would only be when the phase change stops that the temperature will vary significantly. Presumably it knows that the heat battery is full when it gets above the phase change temperature, and empty when below the phase change, but the majority of the SoC will actually be invisible with the sensors it has available. Thus any attempt to measure through use of a flow meter would need to regularly hit a calibration point (Fully charged) to have any accuracy.