GE read only from home assistant?

I'm very very new to home assistant, so be gentle with me folks - for a sense of how new: right now, I feel like I need to do some sort of formal YAML course because every tutorial I encounter makes a whole ton of assumptions about things like how to use the editor in the first place, let alone whether the syntax of what to put in it makes any sense to a newbie.

So in any case, recognising the signs of a learning mountain that needs climbing, I'm restricting myself to looking at the very basics:

1. Show networked devices to see what's going on with them.
2. Push changes back to the networked devices.
3. Arrange information in useful dashboards

I'm not trying to get into automations or do anything particularly clever at this point, I want to learn to walk before I run. I just want to see things, and push changes back, so I + family don't have to remember which of the eleventy billion separate apps & ecosystems we've now got installed on our phones is needed in what situation.

I've achieved steps 1-3 for my Tado and Mixergy systems, but only steps 1 and 3 for Give Energy.

Step 2 eludes me when it comes to the GE battery/inverter: I can mess about with settings like target SOC and discharge power levels from home assistant all day, nothing is passed back through to the GE system. Changes I make in the GE portal are reflected basically instantly in HA, but not vice versa. It's like it's in a read-only state when it comes to Home Assistant.

My assumption is that I've set something up incorrectly - can anyone suggest where I should be looking in GE or HA as a starting point?

NB - I've seen the predbat thing - amazing job Trefor! - and very likely that's where I'll end up... but seems like it will have as steep a learning curve as HA itself, and as you can tell I'm already struggling to diagnose why x or y isn't working so I'm going to ignore any complexity like that that until I've sorted out this basic connectivity stuff and got my head around dashboard and YAML basics, rather than compounding my confusion!

Have you installed and got GivTCP successfully setup?

dunklezhan do you have GivTCP or GivEnergy Local installed? I think GivTCP is the better one for making changes, but GivEnergy Local is great for just viewing data

Re - reading your post you must have GivTCP working in order to read entities.

When you say " nothing is passed back through to the GE system" it probably is, but the GivEnergy dashboards just don't work as you are expecting them. The app/dashboard just displays what was last adjusted through the GivEnergy cloud system, HA makes changes locally on your network, not through the cloud and hence not seen by the GE system.

To check if a setting has changed on the inverter use the remote control page of the web portal ( https://givenergy.cloud/inverter/INVERTERSERIALNUMBER/remote-control) and refresh each register individually. You will likely see that you have been actually changing the settings.

I started off with Home Assistant last November and did not have great ambitions on how far I would implement it. I was thinking I'd use it in a "read only" mode but I've now got Predbat working and controlling the battery. Sounds like you've already make great progress and are hitting problems that most of us had on our (continuing) learning journey.

Ivan Spot-on Ivan

I wrote an explanation of how the GE system, portal, app and GivTCP all hang together on another post (probably ‘first night live on predbat’), but here’s a summary.

1. Your GivEnergy inverter is the master, it holds information about what state it is in.

2. The GE portal contains a copy of the information about what the inverter state. As Ivan says, if you click refresh register in the portal, it will retrieve a copy of the inverter state into the portal, otherwise it assumes the last info it has is correct.

3. If you make a change to a setting in the portal, the change is written to the portal and sent to the inverter. Sometimes the portal can’t connect to the inverter and you get a timeout error in the portal when sending the change.

4. If you make a change in the app, the change is sent to the portal, then to the inverter via 3 above.

So key point at here is that all changes are made via the portal, nothing direct to the inverter. I think even if the app is in local mode it all goes via the portal.

5. GivTCP and GivLocal connect directly from Home Assistant to your inverter on your home network. They read and write info directly from the inverter, they do not go via the GivEnergy portal or cloud. Indeed there’s no published mechanism to update the portal/app with any changes you make locally.

6. And to round off the explanation if you use a cloud battery management system such as WonderWatt, My Energy Optimiser or Octopus R&D, these all make connections from their cloud to the GivEnergy cloud/portal then sent the commands via 3 above.

Thanks Ivan/geoffrey, "concepts and context" is definitely the thing missing from all this, so you've been very helpful!

I mean I say that even though I haven't sorted it yet - but those responses really help as I'm still in the 'wrap my head around it' phase.

Re whether the changes are happening or not - I will look, as you say, but the main reason I don't think it was working is that battery discharge level really did not change. I dropped it from home assistant to 300W, but an hour later the GE portal / app was still discharging at 750W where I had it set before.

Oh - and yes I've got GivTCP on there.

K so yeah - the changes were being passed through, but absolutely were not showing up unless I refreshed the relevant field in the Remote Control bit of the webapp.

I wonder why it didn't seem to be affecting the level of discharge vs house load that the web app was then actually reporting though. Maybe I just didn't leave it long enough Ill check that after dark today when the solar won't get in the way of seeing what's going on.