This is pretty much what I do, but with Home Assistant. Which I agree is out of the reach of this mythical Pensioner that is now the target user (Iām honestly less concerned about the pensioner and more about my inlaws-in-the-medical-industry)
I also donāt think you need to solve all of the issues mentioned in this thread - 80-20 approach. I like @Louisvdw idea of āLimit battery useā - what about just making it a ābetween time X and time Yā? That way the system doesnāt need to āfigure outā when it is daytime.
In that case, the existing Scheduled charging functionality is already sufficient. It also already supports feeding PV to the loads once it goes over the target SOC (as long as it is also above the active MinSoc). And should the batteries fill up during such a slot, it behaves the same way as āKeep batteries chargedā, with the PV going to the loads.
Firstly, I only charge my batteries from solar.
A couple of months ago I came to the conclusion that I am pushing my system unnecessarily hard. Meaning, āwhy am I seeing how much I can pull from the batteriesā etc.
I came to the conclusion that if I divide my daily production from PV by 24hrs and then set my āMax inverter powerā to that figure, the system runs harmoniously the entire 24hrs (not pushing any of the systems limits) I am sure the system will also last much longer utilizing it this way.
This is something roughly similar to what I do, except I do run my inverterās capacity at the PV generated during the day time (plus an offset if Iām willing to discharge the batteries a little). During night time I cap it so that my batteries reach my min SoC roughly at sunrise.
As @plonkster noted once, the inverter does have a standing power draw, so it might be more efficient to run the batteries down to zero as quickly as you are comfortable with, and then let the inverter go into standby mode (consuming much less).
I find that I enjoy a balance of the two. Donāt want to sit with min SoC batteries at 02:00 and then unplanned loadshedding kicks inā¦
Understand, Iām not afraid to run bleeding edge software. Do it all the time, Release Candidate on Venus.
Also understand I use a very teeny bit of HA, just to increase my SOC and a bit of NodeRED on HA, to match inverter to panel watts, to do what GVC does, spread the battery usage over 24h.
Realized my SOC automation stopped. Weeks ago, so cannot restore that backup.
Why?
HA updates ALL THE TIME. I did not notice anything at first, though it was me, again but no prob, how else do you learn. Then I remembered I did not change anything.
So Iām getting really REALLY gatvol of HA breaking things on updates, a lot of the time.
And then when you Google, the answers given have too much Keyboard Warrior āpowerā in them, the gems, if you have the time, being deeply hidden. But they are scarce. Who wants to post answers when most replies are not newbie-friendly?
So Iām learning very hard en very fast towards NodeRed, running on the Venus direct.
Been there, done that. Had to do a few restores as well.
My strategy is to defer all HA updates, we can now pause them. I do a backup prior to allowing updates to happen, standard best practise for me now. Not had any failures the last couple of months. Since my philosophy is to not tinker as far as possible, and make all the smart home systems so wifey can manage on her own, any āprogrammingā is a non starter. Grandma style
I dunno about them, because you when do eventually need to update you will have a huge amount of breaking changes as opposed to making some small changes once a month
Since acquiring the mini-PC from @Deon_in_ZA , Iām running a standard Debian again with HA in a docker container (mostly because I was unsure if the UEFI support is good enough for stock HassOS). I also tried to run mqtt as a docker instance, but it was easier to just run mosquitto directly on Debian. As a resultā¦ no automatic updates
When you do update, as Calypso said, you have a ton of issues hitting you in one go, depending on what they changed and what you use of those changes.
When compared to Victron updates, also sometimes an issue now and then if you are Release Candidate, one realizes that HA still has a way to go ito how they do updates, and when things break, how to help people fix it fast.
Iāve probably not updated HA for a year. Mine is definitely not automated. Since the last update broke my automations, I decided not to update unless the update would have a feature I want or fix something that is broken.
This has always been a nightmare. In industrial automation it was a major event to run updates. Often it wasnāt possible to have a fallback position so one would have to bite the bullet and hopeā¦
But as mentioned you have to do updates (sometimes) since itās irresponsible not to.
I was at the Letseng diamond mine in Lesotho on one occasion and did a firmware update on their PLC. It failed and I couldnāt go back since the program was gone. Panic! I recall I had to do some hardware reset to get itās brain working again. This plant lived and died on this system but they didnāt have a spare CPU. Amazing!
So true! Iāve had this experience myself. Because you have been keeping the show going for years (and couldnāt bill for the service) they think this will go on forever.
The other day I was being squeezed by a āproject engineerā who was trying to complete a job before he left this company. He clearly wanted to complete the installation (plug the gizmo in) and say heād done his bit. Pity that the system still didnāt work but no problem for him. I let rip in an email and now thereās no speaks: everyone āvery disappointedā in my behaviourā¦
I myself donāt have the skill yet, but apparently, ātheyā say, there is a way to tell someone to go to hell in such a decent nice way, that they look very much forward to the trip.
Iāve started dreading the Home Assistant updates too. More recent problem is that something using a cloud service breaks - last time it was my Text to Speech functionality in Google Homes. It was fixed but had to update HA to get there.
The HA updates forces the custom components which I use to be updated, and there arenāt always updates available.
If there are updates available I sometimes have to reconfigure things (such as my Person recognition system because the Frigate guy have also massively updated things on his side).
So I found WHY my automations stopped ā¦ happenstance across this teeny oneliner:
It seems to be a common issue with automations created through the UI. Luckily, the fix is easy - remove the attribute: unit_of_measurement lines. (ā¦ in automation.yaml)
(Iām honestly less concerned about the pensioner and more about my inlaws-in-the-medical-industry)
