I placed my order through EverGreen but have been advised the Battary Pack and Inverter will not be delivered for a few months.
Is the there a demo site that I can start to develop my implementation on whilst waiting for the hardware to arrive?
revans You have my sympathy here. I joined this forum towards the end of last November when I knew I wanted an installation and was fortunate enough to have the full system installed in January this year. I also wanted to get on with some development to integrate the solar system parameters into my home automation but had to wait until after it was commissioned. It took me pretty much all of February to get to where I am now (thanks to givtcp). I could probably have reduced the development time if I'd simply gone with the proffered solution but wasted time trying to implement my own.
There is a demo site where you can see a dashboard with sample data but that doesn't help you to get a feel for how you will work with the controls and data, which is what I had been looking for in November. In fact, it wasn't until after commissioning that my user account was created and I was able to log in to the app and web portal.
There are plenty of people in this community who would offer help and their experience but I think you would do well to explain what you think you would like to do and what you currently use. In the light of experience, I'm happy to use the web portal and app for day to day monitoring and control (I don't actually change settings as the commissioned setup works fine for me) but I do use givtcp and Node-RED for instantaneous import/export on demand as a five minute web portal update period doesn't give me the comfort I'm looking for, especially when I can't see what has been updated and when.
So after a very long wait I have had most of the kit installed. I am just waiting for them to connect the solar panel to the invertor.
At home I run home assistant inside Proxmox on a Dell power edge server.
I have an electric car as well as IoT washing machine and tumble dryer,
What I want to be able to do is get the home automation system to monitor the solar battery and solar generation to decide when to charge the car, run the washing etc. Probably using something like node-RED.
My go too is to run things locally using something like GivTCP but could go via the cloud.
What approach do you recommend starting with?
(Have I given you enough context?)
Regards
Russell
GivTCP is dead easy to install.
Britkak is on this forum.
So is there any thoughts to go Giv TCP or use the Cloud API?
It would be good to know people thoughts along with any pros /cons you folks have found of the two approach's.
Both essentially achieve the same thing (controlling inverter remotely) personally I feel (others will differ)
API
Pros:
Easy to pick up and run with (the documentation page has demo's and tests you can run in browser)
Can run on relatively garbage hardware no problem (ESP32's and so on)
Easier to run outside the home (from say custom apps and so on)
Provided you feed it the right API key it does generally "just work" right off the bat.
Cons:
Has the same update limitations as the portal so data comes in 5 min intervals, not good enough for granular needs like pushing an EV charger output up and down with the ebb & flow of PV output.
At the mercy of "the cloud" & your home internet being up & running
API is on it's 3rd revision, each time caused code breaking changes.
Not as in depth data returned as you would hope.
GivTCP:
Pro's
Massively faster Updates
Local Settings changes no matter what, so long as you have wifi
Much more in depth details of what's going on (including cell voltages) - Almost every single register setting of the inverter is reported.
Developer is open to requests / additional features.
Cons:
Normally requires additional things like VMs/Dockers and so on.
Setup can be a bit of a headache when things don't just work although it's a lot easier now with things like the HA addon.
Still work in progress so stability on builds can be mixed BUT the developer is on here to help sort!
Thanks for the summary that is great....I will start with GivTCP.
The inverter is installed and I can see it on my network. I just need them to connect the panels and complete the install process. At the moment I get the error...
"ERROR:GivTCP_1:Error processing registers: (<class 'ValueError'>, ValueError('All zeros returned by Invertor, skipping update'),
revans yes if its uncommissioned you wont get much out of GivTCP or the API at the moment.
revans
If it's not visible in the portal yet. It wont be sending the JSON info out.
Install complete and the GivTCP working.
I have some questions but I will start a new thread if there are not already answers here.