mgx

Hi Elbow,
skilled - not at all.
Having a lots of fun - yes
My automation is Fibaro HC2 which is a home automation gateway. It's running a wireless communication (zwave) with switches, relays, dimmers, electricity meters, etc. The wireless part is really cool. You just drop a tiny module in a lightswitch wallbox and now you have a remotely controlled lights. And it even measures the acutal power and the total consumption over time. There's a lot of modules from various vendors which are compatible: Fibaro, Qubino, Aeotec, MCO, HeatIt...
Initially, I purchased this because I needed a central management of my electric floor heating and for irrigation too. Then, I gradually added tons of other modules, smartplugs and meters. When I built my solar, it was a logic step to include it too.
3 positive bullets on Fibaro:
wirelles very easy to work with smartphone APP working without any VPN, nor firewall opening, nor subscription service But there are some negatives too:
It's pricey. It's a home automation, but not a telemetry. It's not an industrial-grade product. For home automation it's okay, but I would definitely not use this for life-supporting systems, for example. There are nice charts in the GUI, but the depth of history is limited. Because of the last bullet, I'm storing some of values in the EmonCMS (a part of openenergy monitor that you already know).
I wanted my system to be simple and contain as few layers as possible. Therefore, I'm using the native zwave modules for everything where they are a good fit. For example, I have a plenty of 1-phase and 3-phase electricity meters in the house. All of them talking natively to Fibaro via zwave. Same with floor heating Thermostats. A simple addition was integration of Washing machine - once the laundry is done, it send's me a notification to my smartphone....so I can go and put another batch of dirty laundry in
Another example - just by using a simple smart plug, you can monitor daily consumption of your fridge:

The only thing where wireless protocol was not performing well was the solar integration. So after some failures, I went for industrial PLC which talks to Inverter via RS232 and to Fibaro via JSON over ethernet. I'm trying to stay away from Arduino, Raspberry etc. (There are 3 or 4 Arduinos that I use for some specific tasks, but I'm not planning to add more of them.)
Looking at the HomeAssistant, I would say that it's capabilites would be the more or less the same, but with a more freedom for customization. On the other hand, I can imagine that HomeAssistant is struggling a bit when you are trying to read values from electricity meters for example. I would bet that it needs modbus and some coding, or using the EmonPI and the current transformers. Am I right?
Here is a sample of the stuff that I use as the wireless endpoints:
Qubino, DIN rail 3-phase meter with LCD, 1-phase meter:

HeatIt, Floor heating thermostat:

Fibaro, Smart Plugs:

Fibaro, Tiny wirelles module for mounting into a wallbox, under existing switch:

Sensative, Wireless door/window sensor:

MCO, CO2 monitor:

 
If you have some specific questions, feel free to ask....
Regs,
Youda
 

@Youda it’s a very impressive setup - you are obviously very skilled and having lots of fun.
i have an Openenergymonitor system in the house, together with HomeAssistant and using NodeRed scripts and some home brew for integration and automation.
but I’m very interested in the products that you are using sine HomeAssistant is not very enjoyable to work with.
thanks!

The next part is the circuit with an SSR relay, that will direct "solar energy" into the geyser whenever one of these conditions will be met:
- the battery is full
- the charging current is higher than X amps

The great is, that you can tell the SSR how much power you want to use and it will take care of it using a standard 230V AC phase control. Basically, it's similar to a variable speed capability of an electric drill, for example. The circuit is made of SSR with 0-10V control, EMI filter and 0-10V module (Qubino) that can be wirellesly controlled from my home automation gateway (Fibaro). In the home automation gateway, I have a short script that monitors operating values of the battery and inverters and if there's some spare solar power, it basically adjusts the AC power flowing through the SSR:

There are couple of additional conditions. For example when the AC current draw from both Inverters is too high, I lower the power that's going into the geyser and prioritize the other appliances. Therefore, the full power of invertors is available to any appliance in my LAB, while geyser uses only the "spare power".
The system is fully automatic, but you can monitor it's operation in the dashboard:

 
This is how the script is searching for how much "spare solar power" is available:

 
Hot water temperature chart:

So far, it works good
Youda