Solar PV Monitoring/Automation Thread

Looking to automatically publish the solcast todays forcast to an MQTT broker every morning @ 7am.

I can manually publish the value using the built-in Mosquitto broker integration in HA but struggling to achieve this via yaml or an automation.

Any pointers?

Thanks @Jonathan I was missing the “data:”line. You saved me a few hairs!

I'm not sure it's useful to any of you, but I automated the auto-charge of my Pylontech battery using the pysolarmanv5 library for Python, which talks to my Solis inverter. The code is mostly in R and Python and is available on my GitHub page (toledobastos). Apparently I can't post links to this forum, so Google is your friend to find it.

I'm using met eireann and solcast. I'm finding met eireann one to be more accurate but it's manual and I'm still trying to figure out how to get it into homeassistant. I'm just doing it in excel. The solcast one is a bit off so I'm hesitant to rely on it for automation.

yup. I got these done with the code I mentioned above. Will take the averages of a range of forecasts, check if it’s winter or DST, and charge the battery accordingly. There’s also options to calibrate the charge based on SOC and a few other variables. Have a look at it and you should be able to do it.

Yea, that's what I meant about a single automation: If you want to wait until day rate, just set a lower charge current, and let that run until 8am, instead of having to change current to "charge" and then "pause" at different times. So:

• Manually set the inverter charge times to start at 11pm and finish at 8am (and never change these)
• have a single automation that sets a (low) charge current that spans the full 9 hour period (or the period from when your automation runs until 8am)

To put in 10kwh over the 9 hours its 21A approx (assuming charge voltage of 53V). My automations have often set 0A or a couple of Amps to get as far as morning.

I wouldn't be separating grid_charge and Pause_battery_drain, as they are the same thing really.

The base-load question only comes into it if deciding whether to charge at all. e.g. IF you have 14kwh usable in you battery at night, AND you know you'll use approx 3kwh before morning, THEN set storage_mode to 33 (charge disable) because you don't need to charge at all.

UI-wise, it could be a single input_number slider "target SOC".

And optionally a second input_boolean "charge tonight" (which maps to setting storage_mode to 33 or 35)

The pause would be to say charge until SOC = 80% for example (or also to stop drain while I charge EV) but yeah maybe I'll use something like charge X kwh (5% SOC = 1 kwh) for the times I don't want the battery to be 100% in the morning else if the sun comes out will export right away, which is not what I want ofc.

I guess I could work out some formula that says well I need to charge 9kwh in 9 hours so 1kw/h is about 20A like you mentioned

Since I have the timed charge values on the inverter, I think that technically I don't even need to turn off the charge in the morning as the inverter does it anyway right?

I was able to get that to work one time only, and then I think I broke it after trying to update its FW.

After that I couldn't for the life of me get the LAN logger to connect to Solis so it can dump that data too and the modbus calls also stopped working. FW needed to be updated as it was throwing mad values in the hundreds of kwh generated into the solis portal.

Shame really as I much prefer wired over wifi.

Got solar installed and looking at solis cloud app and trying to make sense of what the percentage under the battery represents, say I see the following at battery icon

19%

0.12kW

The other items are 0.003 being generated, 1.17kW consumption and 1.047 from the grid,

I assume it means that of the 1.17kW taking 0.12 from battery, this is 19% of total consumption coming from battery?

Is it as simple as that, thanks in advance

This should give you the parts needed to implement a "Target SOC" based charging implementation:

1) it decides whether you need to charge or not (i.e. if your current SOC, minus night usage, is greater than target SOC)

2) if you do need to charge, then what current to set (including 0A to pause discharging if you "nearly" have enough)

Note, I just threw this together now. Its not tested at all (and its not what I'm using myself as I'm doing in python), so test it fully before you use it

Put this into the Developer Tools -> template

{## Change these for your system: ##}
{% set charge_voltage = 53 %}
{% set charge_hours = 9 %}
{% set night_usage_wh = 3000 %}
{% set battery_capacity_wh = 20000 %}
{% set lower_soc_limit = 20 %}
{% set now_soc = states('sensor.battery_soc') |int %}
{% set target_soc = states('input_number.target_soc') | int%}

{## Dont change from here down ##}

{% set soc_to_wh = (battery_capacity_wh / 100) | int %}
{% set now_battery_usable_wh = ((now_soc - lower_soc_limit) * soc_to_wh )| int %}
{% set target_battery_usable_wh = ((target_soc - lower_soc_limit) * soc_to_wh )| int %}

{## This is just printing stuff, for debugging purposes ##}
now_battery_usable_wh: {{ now_battery_usable_wh }}
target_battery_usable_wh: {{ target_battery_usable_wh }}


{% if (now_battery_usable_wh - night_usage_wh) > target_battery_usable_wh %}
  Have enough to get to target SOC at morning; dont need to charge
  TODO: Set storage_mode (43110) to 33 here to turn off "charging", and let the battery discharge as normal
{% else %}
  Dont Have enough to get to target SOC at morning, so we need to charge (even it its at 0A)
  TODO: Set storage_mode (43110) to 35 here to turn on charging
  {% set charge_needed_wh = target_battery_usable_wh - (now_battery_usable_wh) %}
  charge_needed_wh: {{ charge_needed_wh }}
  {% set current_needed_a = ((charge_needed_wh/charge_hours) / charge_voltage) %}
  {% if current_needed_a < 0.1 %}
    Only need to "pause" (i.e. stop discharging for the night to reach the target)
    {% set current_needed_a = 0 %}
  {% endif %}
  current_needed_a: {{ current_needed_a }}
  {% set current_needed_deci_amps = (current_needed_a * 10) | int%}
  current_needed_deci_amps: {{ current_needed_deci_amps }}
  {## Doubly make sure its a safe value ##}
  {% if current_needed_deci_amps < 0 %}
    {% set current_needed_deci_amps = 0 %}
  {% endif %}
  {% if current_needed_deci_amps > 1000 %}
    {% set current_needed_deci_amps = 1000 %}
  {% endif %}
  TODO: set charge current (43141) to {{ current_needed_deci_amps }}
{% endif %}

Change the values in the top section to match your system. The initial values I've set are for a 9 hour charge duration (i.e. full d/n window), on a system with a 20kwh battery that has a 20% SOC lower threshold.

And put this is as your input_number:

  target_soc:
    name: Target SOC
    min: 40
    max: 100
    step: 5
    initial: 50

Tip: on your phone, move the target_soc slider, and then you can see the values change on your laptop when looking at the template, like the "deci_amps"

To start with, see that its printing out the values you'd expect. Then, break it up into a script/automation. And then set the register values as per the TODOs.

Exactly. Keep it simple :-)

Personally, I wouldn't like to be looking at lots of toggles in UI, and I certainly wouldn't want to be looking at a UI that is asking me to calculate or set a charge current. Code can do all that so much better than I can. What is easy to understand is battery SOC, so IMO that's the only thing that the UI should show/ask for, ... and the rest is done behind the scenes...

For your case, with an EV that you may want to charge on many nights, you may want to stop battery discharge every night (so you don't forget and end depleting battery).

So, you could remove this condition completely from my above post and you will always "charge", even at 0A (which just means stop discharging)

{% if (now_battery_usable_wh - night_usage_wh) > target_battery_usable_wh %}

Or, even better, you could create an input_boolean to "Force Always Charge".

And here is the full thing if you want an extra that toggle to "force_always_charge", so you're free to use any appliance (incl EV charger) at night, as long you set the toggle to On.

{## Change these for your system: ##}
{% set charge_voltage = 53 %}
{% set charge_hours = 9 %}
{% set night_usage_wh = 3000 %}
{% set battery_capacity_wh = 20000 %}
{% set lower_soc_limit = 20 %}
{% set now_soc = states('sensor.battery_soc') |int %}
{% set target_soc = states('input_number.target_soc') | int%}

{## Dont change from here down ##}

{% set soc_to_wh = (battery_capacity_wh / 100) | int %}
{% set now_battery_usable_wh = ((now_soc - lower_soc_limit) * soc_to_wh )| int %}
{% set target_battery_usable_wh = ((target_soc - lower_soc_limit) * soc_to_wh )| int %}

{## This is just printing stuff, for debugging purposes ##}
now_battery_usable_wh: {{ now_battery_usable_wh }}
target_battery_usable_wh: {{ target_battery_usable_wh }}


{% if (now_battery_usable_wh - night_usage_wh) > target_battery_usable_wh and is_state('input_boolean.force_always_charge', 'off') %}
  Have enough to get to target at morning; dont need to charge
  TODO: Set storage_mode (43110) to 33 here to turn off "charging"
{% else %}
  Dont have enough, or force charge. We need to charge (even at 0A)
  TODO: Set storage_mode (43110) to 35 here to turn on charging
  {% set charge_needed_wh = target_battery_usable_wh - (now_battery_usable_wh) %}
  charge_needed_wh: {{ charge_needed_wh }}
  {% set current_needed_a = ((charge_needed_wh/charge_hours) / charge_voltage) %}
  {% if current_needed_a < 0.1 %}
    Only need to "pause" (i.e. stop discharging for the night to reach the target)
    {% set current_needed_a = 0 %}
  {% endif %}
  current_needed_a: {{ current_needed_a }}
  {% set current_needed_deci_amps = (current_needed_a * 10) | int%}
  current_needed_deci_amps: {{ current_needed_deci_amps }}
  {## Doubly make sure its a safe value ##}
  {% if current_needed_deci_amps < 0 %}
    {% set current_needed_deci_amps = 0 %}
  {% endif %}
  {% if current_needed_deci_amps > 1000 %}
    {% set current_needed_deci_amps = 1000 %}
  {% endif %}
  TODO: set charge current (43141) to {{ current_needed_deci_amps }}
{% endif %}

input_number:

  target_soc:
    name: Target SOC
    min: 40
    max: 100
    step: 5
    initial: 50

input_boolean:

  force_always_charge:
    name: Force Always Charge