I recently got solar installed at my place and was wondering if anyone had tips on things like:
- Using the Energy dashboard effectively
- Template Sensors I should set up for energy tracking
- Graphs or visualising production/usage in dashboards
- Automations that you’ve used to help save using energy from the grid
Look up your inverter brand and pray there is an integration for it. Also: try to make your electrical meter smart to be able to tell the difference between pulling from grid and delivering to grid. If you already have a smart meter, see if it exposes some interface (like P1 with the DSMR protocol for example) to easily integrate the meter into home assistant.
I have done all this with a goodwe inverter and a kamstrup meter P1 port using a DSMR dongle.
If you need any pointers, dm me.
Mine has an integration which is handy (enphase). But it doesn’t tell me my grid usage. I’m trying to calculate it by taking my total consumption and subtracting my solar production. I think it roughly gives me the right overall number.
The problem is I can’t seem to get how much I’m feeding back into the grid. I might be able to work it out with some sort of calculation.
I might DM you about the P1, as it sounds like that might do the job.
For reference: smart meters like Kamstrup are in use all over the EU. Example of a p1 dongle is the “smart meter gateway” which can be read from home assistant via the DSMR integration or directly from mqtt.
This would give you the counters for exactly how much you have pulled from and pushed into the grid.
Can confirm this will integrate nicely into the energy dashboard.
And biggest tip: when you have configured everything, it will take up to 2 hours before any data is visible from the energy dashboard. This screwed me over quite a bit, needless to say :-)
I have enphase inverters as well. I don’t find their data to be useful.
I went the route of installing two circuit setup boards running esp8266. One is installed in the subpanel in the garage where the solar feeds, the other is installed at the main panel on the main cables before any loads.
This way I can more accurately see production and usage. And can tell during production how much I’m actually utilizing before sending residual back to grid.
If I had only one panel and the solar fed directly into it, I’d use one of the 6 channel circuitsetup boards instead to monitor both solar feed and main.