Home Assistant!

[Stinsy]

Been meaning to get involved with this for a while. Mainly because I access my various devices through a miriad of different platforms and they're pretty inconsistent WRT features.

Anyway, I've bought a pi5 and will give it a shot.

How many of you chaps have Home Assistant set up? Any advice?

[SimonSays]

Home Assistant is a fairly steep learning curve, even for those of us with programming or web development experience.
Get HACS installed early; it's a third party repository of integrations.

[shirehorse99]

what are you going to use it for - we use it for lights and other sensors + energy monitoring, car apps, heat controls , solar and EV charging - its great

[shirehorse99]

my best money spinner is auto charge house batteries when car IOG starts charging outside 11-30 to 5-30 slot

[Stinsy]

what are you going to use it for - we use it for lights and other sensors + energy monitoring, car apps, heat controls , solar and EV charging - its great

There are a few things I’m currently lacking!

1) Everything in one place.
2) Timed functions, eg turn a heater on for 30 mins
3) Better control of my A2A (eg turn it on earlier in the morning if the weather is cold).
4) Similar with my SH, change how much charge depending on weather, and let me prevent it charging for a day without relying on me remembering to turn it back on the next day.
5) Get some more sophisticated control of my inverter. Eg get it doing different things on different days, maybe even dependent on predicted sunshine.
6) get some power monitoring report how much devices are using…

I’m also keen to understand what else it can do…

[shirehorse99]

if you are using a raspberry pi try and use an ssd or similar - sd cards are given a bit of a hammering in home assistant and fail - I use a NUC but you can get ssd for pi now.

also I have google auto backup installed on ours so we don't lose anything if anything fails - hardware or software updates

[shirehorse99]

mqtt inverter control is great in home assistant - I change how much we charge on cheaprate nightly - especially in the summer - I will have to automate it one day

[Krill]

If you got the RP5 then there are straight forward ways to install an nvme drive, takes about half an hour to set up.

The bigger issue is that the main open source control (that I know of, happy to be corrected) for the luxpowertek inverters is at https://github.com/guybw and that requires HA OS. I got it set up and tested it worked (it does, and allows control when the Chinese servers go down), but started to struggle and had other stuff to dedicate time to on my home server. I think there's even a way to remove the G100(?) export limit.

I agree with the learning curve bit: I've spent the last year learning about networking, reverse proxies and docker. If you have kids and a social life, there's a lot to learn over a long time period. The other point is that an RP5 can quickly get overwhelmed if you want to do lots of things, like integrating ip camera recording that involves graphical work ie encoding.

[Andy]

Although not using homasssistant, a fun little project on the pi would be to automate the Octopus stuff. I had mine make sure that if I was predicted to run out of battery during the day before the night charging period, then I would use the grid during the typical hours of the saving periods. I was going to use the grid anyways so might as well do it from 1630-1930 and then the morning period as a second choice. This was to make sure I actually had some energy to save.

Octopus has a great API. I'd scan it every hour or so for new savings periods and then register for them through the api. If there was a saving period I'd obviously set max export and turn stuff on automagically. I never had to respond in the app or think about it.

[Stinsy]

Thanks guys!

I've gotten it set up and integrated with my smartplugs, A2A, and shellys. I've ordered 4x shelly power monitors, not 100% decided what these are going on yet but deffo the A2A, maybe the dishwasher, washing machine, and tumbler. I've also installed HACS but not gotten much further.

I'm going to invest some time watching a few youtube videos.

Advice on suitable integrations would be appreciated. Octopus is a no-brainer...

My first task is to trigger the SH based on weather forecast. EG if overnight low is higher than 10℃ no charging at all, if it is lower than 10℃ but higher than 0℃, 3hrs, and if it is 0℃ or below 6hrs. (or whatever provides the correct balance between comfort and economy). Once I've done that I'll do similar with the A2A.

Then we have integration with my LuxPower inverter to work on. I've seen a few posts on reddit and forums where people have gotten something working. But I doubt there is a nice youtube video to follow.