OK,( let's install this system!

[Tinbum]

Looks like I’ll have to get on to Home Assistant and start playing. Now to see if I can find an RPi at a reasonable price

Be very careful on eBay as their are lots of scam sellers selling them. (looking for the 40 day delivery from UK gives a clue as well as zero feedback and new seller !!!)

[Stinsy]

Yesterday I added two more US3000C batteries to the pack, taking me to 21Kwh. I think that should allow me to shift something close to 80-90% of our usage to off-peak E7 tariff electricity. To get any further, I'd need to add a second inverter and up the amount I can draw from 3.5kw to 7kw, as when the heat pump is running and we're cooking dinner in the evening we can easily be pulling 6-7kw for a while.

Nice setup, lots of storage there! I've learned to accept short-term house loads above my 3.6kW inverter capacity as insignificant and short-lived. A HP does dramatically increase your winter "baseload" though so you might decide a 5kW inverter is worthwhile.

[SafetyThird]

Looks like I’ll have to get on to Home Assistant and start playing. Now to see if I can find an RPi at a reasonable price

Be very careful on eBay as their are lots of scam sellers selling them. (looking for the 40 day delivery from UK gives a clue as well as zero feedback and new seller !!!)

You're absolutely right, and so many people charging double their value because of the scarcity. I decided not to go that route and have installed HA on a VirtualBox VM on my very old Mac mini that I use as a print and media server, so far it's working very well. I've ditched the Hue hub in favour of a Zigbee stick, bought some zigbee power monitoring plugs, some ESPhome monitoring plugs, have moved all the Meross smart plugs over along with half of the Shelley switches and I'm slowly learning my way around the software.

Unfortunately, half of my Shelley switches came pre-flashed with HomeKit software which I'm unable to flash back to original firmware as I don't seem to be able to find a suitable port to access the webserver and the company I bought them off hasn't replied to my query, so I expect I'll replace those with new Shelley's so it's all on one system.

it's a fairly steep learning process for someone with very little software background, I'm definitely a hardware guy

[SafetyThird]

Nice setup, lots of storage there! I've learned to accept short-term house loads above my 3.6kW inverter capacity as insignificant and short-lived. A HP does dramatically increase your winter "baseload" though so you might decide a 5kW inverter is worthwhile.

Thanks, couldn't have done it without so much help from folks on here. We'll go through this winter and monitor everything carefully. The HP often runs at low power just circulating warm water which only pulls a few hundred watts, will be interesting to monitor over a winter and see how much of the time it's doing that compared with how much time it's pulling high power draw. If I think it'll be worthwhile in the longer run, it would cost about £1000 to add a second inverter as they can be chained together, it's one of the reasons I went with the Squirrel Pod inverter and pylontech batteries, the option to expand in a modular fashion. That's paid off already by being able to just add two additional batteries as needed.

I have some tweaking to do with how best to set charge levels for overnight charging and how to monitor expected solar. I have home assistant setup and I'm using the Solcast integration to predict solar and will monitor that and compare to actual solar generated over the next few months with a view to eventually being able to automate it. We'll see how that works out.

[daveflorida0]

Im trying to get hold of chris who wrote the software for lxp-bridge as im having problems installing on a raspberry pi. Can anyone assist with a contact e mail . Thanks

[Fintray]

Im trying to get hold of chris who wrote the software for lxp-bridge as im having problems installing on a raspberry pi. Can anyone assist with a contact e mail . Thanks

I'll let him know.

[Caesium]

Im trying to get hold of chris who wrote the software for lxp-bridge as im having problems installing on a raspberry pi. Can anyone assist with a contact e mail . Thanks

Thanks for the headsup Fintray

dave, I'll drop you a PM with email