For those of us who aren’t technical whiz’s with programming etc, can some please explain these and whether it’s worth implementing them/why? (And how - do you just use a standard pc or do you have to use a raspberry pie or something?(something else I know little about 😂)
Smk82 If you just want the Givenergy plant to operate as designed (by them), just set it to ECO with your timed charge to coincide with your EV charger (if you have one). If you have an EV and a wall charger which can operate cooperatively with your Givenergy plant, then all's good; sit back and enjoy benefiting from your investment. You don't need anything else, just don't plan to pay your energy bill based on the Givenergy portal; go with what your electricity meter says.
The Givenergy portal does work well with some electricity companies (Octopus in particular) and with solar forecasting providers.
If you want to pull together data from different systems and moreso if you want to make something operate automatically in a particular mode, given parameters in a separate system, then consider how you would like these things to happen. If you want to manipulate the parameters in one of these systems to trigger something, then some form of logic can help. For example, if you want to receive an email (or a prompt from Alexa) when your battery reaches 100% (or drops below 10%) SoC, then you can do this yourself using Home Assistant or Node-RED or some other home automation integration. Givenergy are working on an interface with Alexa, but that is not yet available.
Also, if you want to be able to control/monitor the Givenergy plant during an internet disconnection, you can only do this with a local device interfacing to the inverter over your home network.
There are lots of ways to build some home automation. You can buy some hardware dedicated for the purpose (Home Assistant Yellow, Raspberry Pi, Intel NUC) or use old PC or laptop or run Docker on one of the aforementioned devices or a Network Attached Server (NAS) such as a Synology. The options for hosting the automation are as broad as the options for how you get everything to talk to each other. It all depends on whether you have the time and interest to invest in learning how some of it works. There is a huge community for Home Assistant and many ways to implement it.
I think the answer to your question is that if you are puzzled by what it all means, don't worry about it. On the other hand, if you're intrigued and wonder what possibilities it could open up with other aspects of your home, then find an old computer or laptop and start with Home Assistant. Don't bother trying to buy a Raspberry Pi at the moment, it's cost that isn't necessary and anyway, they are like hen's teeth.
Tim kudos for giving one of the best concise explanation that covers all aspects for a newbie !!
It's definitely worth having a play with Home Assistant, but a lot of people just want things to work intelligently and to be able to have an easy way to control their charge during offpeak and timed export.
If you want to try a few things out, you can always check the GivEnergy docs here:
https://givenergy.cloud/docs/api/v1
Note that you will need to create an API key from the Dashboard under Account Settings, Manage Account Security first.
You can then use something like Postman https://www.postman.com/ to test some of the APIs for yourself and validate the desired effect on the GiveEnergy portal or via the mobile app.
Cheers,
Wim
Wonder Watt if you're just looking to carry the overnight charge according to the next day's forecast, and maybe some other scheduling, my palm.py code can be run natively on most platforms and also forms the basis of the smart forecast plugin in HA. www.github.com/salewis38/palm
That's useful, thanks @stevelewis and for the link to the repo.
We rolled our custom solution with a simple and easy-to-understand Web UI for Growatt initially and recently added GivEnergy.
Mainly for users who want to be hands-off and have no inclination to run Python scripts or mess around with YAML config. 😉