Our general setting for the house prioritises energy use as follows :
Solar » Battery » Grid
This means we minimise our usage of the grid when possible.
Given the cheap rate period of energy usage through the night, we had manually set the inverter to charge the battery from the grid during the core hours 23:30 - 05:30. This effectively stops the battery from being used to power the house in that period and we have no solar in that period bar the peak summer months.
As per the previous posts on this solar project, I had managed to identify that It was possible to talk to the data loggers connected to my inverters from my local network. Reading up further on this I found that loggers use a proprietary protocol (Solarman v5 protocol). Several fantastic folks have done the leg work on and built libraries that use Modbus type calls to pull the data.
The project that I had the best initial experience with was solismon3.
The data loggers that I discovered at the end of my installation have been connected to my home wifi by the installer. The default behaviour is that they probe the two inverters and send a burst of data to a cloud service every 5 minutes or so.
The loggers also have a local web interface that provides a way of controlling the device along with some basic data. The default username/password for these devices is admin/admin.
