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Posted

My inverter came with watchtower cd and if I plug my laptop into the comms port then I can see the readings but need to get the data stored, which I think would work with the raspberri pi. You must excuse me but my knowledge is zero on this stuff, but not afraid to learn and do things myself.  So gladly accept advice.

 

Posted (edited)

Yep mine also came with watchpower, but its quite useless when you dont have a laptop or pc connected right by the inverter. But on my specific inverter theres also no logging on watchpower. I would really recommend you get a pi 4 at pishop or similar. The software side is free. Added bonus with home assistant is you can automate settings on  your inverter. I use it to switch to batteries late at night when the power draw is less.

Edited by Theokie
Posted (edited)

If you read the README (pic attached) you will see that I say its an easy to use install script for the docker image from Neds repo. Its the first paragraph of the readme. Also that is not a fork, a fork is this https://github.com/BionicWeb/docker-voltronic-homeassistant. Changes are every 10 seconds reporting, configs for home assistant and mqtt in docker-compose file, but you can find that on the github link provided.  Not sure if thats a problem, the script sets everything up so that you dont need to worry about getting docker running, and home assistant setup. Its a script I made for myself to quickly setup an inverter monitor, so people can use or dont use as they please. 😉

30DB7F20-6367-4135-AB7F-ECB5BA24D0AE.jpeg

Edited by Theokie
More info
  • 1 month later...
Posted
On 2020/09/10 at 11:34 AM, garethmo said:

im going to give this a bash today and see if i come right, i am a noob to pi and the software so will be interesting to see how it pans out

 

so just too add to this, it installed fine but i couldn't get it to work.. i eventually jut gave up and built my own grafana graphs to monitor the system

  • 1 year later...
Posted

i installed this on a old PI3 i had laying around.

seems to have installed fine but i am a bit lost on the instruction "stand up the container"

think that is what is preventing Home assistant from populating info.

I am a total newb to this and have tried installing it a dozen times and my only conclusion is as above.

Posted
On 2020/07/24 at 1:43 PM, Willem H said:

What options does one have to monitor the inverter. This is what I found are there cheaper option.

Referring to this specific question, so excluding open source solutions, and based on my own relatively limited experience.

ICC Solar and Solar Assistant

Both works well, but very different pieces of software, if I had to pick one only I would go with ICC, it has some features that lacks in Solar Assistant such as

  • Output to PVOutput.org (not that important, but still nice to have)
  • Data backups can be done by yourself. 
  • Cannot connect a local monitor for easy viewing

If something goes wrong with your Solar Assistant you dump it and start over, and will lose all your data in the process. It has no backup method, you cannot SSH into the device to do your own backup, they disable all monitor output etc. (This could probably be rectified if you know Linux well enough)

With ICC in comparison you can SSH into the PI and run a backup script, should something go wrong just reinstall or replace, and restore you data (I have done it already). With out office install we have a monitor connected to the ICC device so at a glance we can see what is going on.

Both will integrate with Home Assistant via MQTT, but by default it will not add solar to your energy dashboard, and getting it to work is still eluding me. 

ICC also has web based dashboards, but not nearly as sexy as Solar Assistant.

  • 1 month later...

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