Hi all,
I’ve had a Victron Solar installation since 2019. It has grown into 2x5KVa inverters, 2x Victron MPPTs, 6xPylontech 3500s, a headless venus and about 5000w of solar panel. The intention was to reduce my municipal electricity costs for my pending retirement. I had a geyserwise TSE installed with 2 dedicated solar panels, but was not particularly happy with it’s lack of reporting or practical management. My wife veto’ed the installation of the ugly control panel in the bathroom so it’s in the loft along with the solar system. I was planning on trying to write software to provide better management of the geyserwise, but then I came across the really superior geyserwala controller. I bought and installed one then started toying with the idea of adding some automation to use up surplus solar in the afternoons. I looked at various options including node-red but because I’ve got many years of experience in the management and automation of large (datacentre) unix systems I decided to try automating from the command line using a shell script, curl and mosquitto_sub. This is working the way I want it to so now I’m lloking at a similar type of solution to auto charge the batteries based on Eskom se Push loadshedding information. I know there are nod-red and other solutions but I don’t want to make changes to the Venus and I’m not sure it has the capacity to run node-red. I’m currently running my automation from a unix laptop but I’m planning on using a minimum config headless raspberry PI.
Does anyone out there have any experience in this area?
Regards, Simon
Welcome Simon!
I run NodeRED on the Venus/Cerbo, to control when my geyser goes on/off based on Victron parameters.
NodeRED comes with all that is needed for Victron.
Just enable Venus OS Large:
https://www.victronenergy.com/live/venus-os:large
Thanks TheTerribleTriplet,
Unfortunately I’ve just got a venus which afaik doesn’t support the OS Large. I’m trying to do things with minimal alteration to the venus environment.
Regards, Simon
Venus has that feature, an ito minimal interference, NodeRED by Victron on a Venus, it works. 
It is “built-in” - just enable it.
AND, when the firmware updates, it is done automatically without affecting anything. NodeRED is also updated by Victron developers when needed.
Thanks, I will give it a try.
Regards, Simon