Solar Control

We've had our solar PV panels installed for over a year now and they've been working well. The same cannot be said of the battery installation.

Our setup is pretty standard.

• Solax X1 Hybrid 3.7kW Inverter
• 12 solar PV panels totalling 3.6kW
• 2 4.5kW Solax Triple Power batteries

Our inverter has stopped talking to the meter (which was giving incorrect data anyway, though it has now been replaced) which means that the batteries are essentially useless at present :-(

While waiting for the replacement inverter to be delivered from Solax (thanks to their technical guy Mason for being so helpful) I started thinking it must be possible to charge and discharge the batteries remotely? I have power usage data available so can tailor the charge/discharge easily enough, I just need some way of controlling the inverter. Simples!

When I came across the PowerScraper project on github I thought my search was over. Modbus/TCP is simple enough to use and initially it all looked good. Then I tried controlling the inverter and it failed. More research showed that the code worked for the previous version of inverter (mine is a Gen3, his a Gen2) and they changed the control method between versions :-(

Lots of reading around pointed me at a set of configurations for HomeAssistant that seemed to do what I needed and had information for my inverter. Sadly, while I can write to all the registers and modify the values, it falls short of delivering the level of control of PowerScraper.

The current situation is that while I can easily charge the batteries from the solar, I can't discharge them! If anyone knows of a way to tell the inverter to discharge then I'd love to hear from you as it would be nice to finally use the batteries as intended...