Solardad

Well EV's are on their way, so what works today may well not work once the move away from ICE vehicles begins, I've begun planning for around 24x 450w total panels for that occurrence. Lets not forget water, another rapidly increasing cost, so borehole is on the way, yet another energy requirement to be added, along with air to water for the kitchen. 
Result would be never paying for water, lights or fuel ever again. Worth it? definitely, but maybe I'm just crazy.

OK, as I posted elsewhere I was looking out for a Black Friday deal for a "8kW System" - hate that way of thinking because I don't believe 8kWp PV, 8kW inverter and 8kWh storage is a balanced system for most users - almost certainly it will be way heavy on panels and light on storage, resulting in lots of unused energy. 
I got lucky with a super deal, fully installed with COC essentially for a little less than I could buy the main components in the retail market.  In the end, my selected equipment reads like this:
14 x Canadian Solar CS3W-455MS HiKu Super High Power Mono PERC modules - that is 6.37kWp but with my roof angle of 7° I will start with a 8 or 10% drop off the bat 8kW Deye SUN-8K-SG01LP1
-US/EU Inverter 2x Shoto SDA10-48100 5.12kWh LiFePO4 batteries for 10.24kWh of storage. I think I'm still panel-heavy and storage-light but I do believe it is better balanced than a typical "8kW system". And a third battery is only a card swipe away...
My installation started on Thursday, and will only be completed later today (Saturday), but here are some early pics:    

Before, looking true north. Stoep roof slopes 7° to north. Pool heater tubes more or less where the panels will go.
 

Before, looking west. Notice palms that can only be touched at risk of permanent solitary confinement. Will keep them trimmed.
 

Pool heater is history
 

Mounting structure installed, panels being laid down
 

First panels being installed. Finicky work this.


All treehugger ... solar geyser framed by solar panels


Most panels up - looks better than the pool heater tubes!
 

All panels installed - looking west


Another one looking east - roof looking tatty and needs some paint. Nice winter project coming up.
 

All panels in looking east


Surprise! The laundry room where the inverter will go has drywall cladding over face brick. To offset the inverter to an effective flush mount required some nifty brackets. Mecano courtesy of Builders. Only minor mods required. The loose end was tack welded after the pic was taken.
 

Cutout for inverter done, brackets fitted. End day 1. Lesson for the day: Get your roof checked by a professional contractor before starting. The guys fastened some of the loose sheets but a coat of paint beforehand would have been ideal.
 

Inverter, AC breakers (left), DC breakers (right), fusebox (below) and batteries installed. Should have been mounted 200-300mm higher to clear the counter top I want to install - will have to make a cutout for the fuse box.
 

Inverter and associated hardware


End day 2. Batteries comms tested. Unseen work was to connect the PV strings and bring the DC cable to the other side of the house, which required roof sheets to be lifted. Lesson for the day: do not attempt DIY for a project of this size if it is your first one - bound to cost more in time (and posisbly real money) when done.
So on to final wiring and commisioning today!
 
 
 

Just wanted to drop a quick note of thanks for the info from this thread on getting the monitoring setup for this class of inverters. I have a Sol-Ark 12k (american cousin to the SunSynk/DEYE/etc) and was able to make the connection. I am embarrassed to say that the biggest issue which wasted a toon of time was trying to get my RPI 4 setup to recognize the USB-RS485 dongle to work so for now I have Node-Red running off an old laptop for now until I can get a different USB-RS485 adapter. 
So far the Node-Red Flows that @Bloubul7 provided of the box! Many thanks Bloubul7!  The modbus registers appear to be identical. I am still early in the process of reviewing the data and getting it into Influx but will post an update on some of the hurdles I had to go through. Thanks! 

Good day All,
Over the past couple of months I have received numerous requests to share my NodeRed flows used for monitoring the status of the SunSynk inverter.  My initial idea was to package all of the flows into an easy to use package and user interface, however my work loads have not provided me the luxury of time to play around and make it a fool proof system. 
Please note that the use of these flows are at your own discretion with no liability to either myself, this site nor any members of this site.  Do not attempt implement these flows if you are unfamiliar with the working of the ModBus protocol or basic programming.
Brief overview of the flows:
LoadShedStatus - This flow determines the loadshedding status through a webscraper.  I use this information to trigger a secondary set of settings to the inverter in case of load shedding. ModBusRead - This flow is responsible for reading information from the Inverter via the Modbus Flex getter ModBusWrite - This flow is responsible for writing settings back to the inverter via the Modbus flex getter Inverter Monitoring - This flow is responsible for obtaining all of the inverter monitoring values.  The values are then send to Home Asssistant via MQTT as well as logged to an InfluxDB for monitoring via Grafana SSFormRead - This flow reads the current system settings from the inverter and display it via the NodeRed UI SSFormWrite - This flow writes any changes made to the system settings via the NodeRed UI back to inverter SSDSRead - This flow reads the "Default Settings" from storage and displays it via the NodeRed UI.  I use the "Default Settings" to store my optimal system settings when there is no Load Shedding. SSDSWrite - This flow writes the "Default Settings" from the storage to the Inverter.  The flow is also triggered automatically from the LoadShedding status flow SSLSRead - This flow reads the "Load Shedding Settings" from storage and displays it via the NodeRed UI.  I use the "Default Settings" to store my optimal system settings when there is no Load Shedding. SSLSWrite - This flow writes the "Load Shedding Settings" from the storage to the Inverter.  The flow is also triggered automatically from the LoadShedding status flow TimeMode - This flow triggers different settings on different days of the week.  My PV Solar is currently not big enough to carry my whole house, I utilize this flow to feed electricity back into the non-essential loads on the days which my domestic worker is not working.  This helps me to optimize my savings on certain days of the week while maintaining healthy battery levels. NodeRed Palettes required for the flows:
node-red-contrib-actionflows node-red-contrib-influxdb node-red-contrib-modbus node-red-contrib-queue-gate node-red-contrib-schedex node-red-contrib-simple-gate node-red-dashboard The next couple of posts have been reserved to further expand on the hardware requirements and basic set up of the monitoring.
The idea of sharing my flows is to contribute to the community, let us keep this going as a community project by assisting and contributing to project.
flows (5).json sunsynk_modbus.docx

Web interface sorted.  I can now remotely alter my inverter settings.
Next I want to integrate the settings into my automation flows.  This would essentially allow me to run two seperate sets of settings, Loadshedding vs No loadshedding.  The load shedding settings can be triggered by a webhook and will ensure that the battery charging is prioritized when loadshedding is active.

Hi and welcome to the forum,
On the inverter side I have made use of a Raspberry Pi Zero with RS485 expansion HAT.   The inverter connects to the Pi through the RS485 port using the pinouts posted earlier
The Pi Zero has been configured as a Modbus Gateway and essentially converts to the Modbus RTU to Modbus TCP.  See link for library used - https://medium.com/@boonsanti/raspberry-pi-3-model-b-modbus-rs-485-to-modbus-tcp-ip-gateway-9ed14ce2c08e
I then have another Raspberry Pi which I use as my main Home automation server (Pi 4, 8gb ram with 256gb NVME drive).  On the server Pi I utilize Node Red to communicate with the Mod Bus relay and retrieve the specific register addresses which I want to monitor.  From there Node Red then formats the values and MQTT then values to my Home Assistant for display as well as log the values in an Influx DB for Grafana integration

 

 

All of the critical information captured and scaled.  Now to start with the user interface and some nice Grafana graphs.  Information is updated ever 20 seconds.  Currently using Modbus over TCP to my Home Assistant server.  After this is running perfectly, I will start playing around with a NodeMCU to see if I can make a stand alone solution with a web interface which would be able to change settings as well.