Two years ago, I installed solar panels on the roof, and was rewarded with enough power to run the house, charge the car, and even run the heat pump for much of the year.

Another reward was the SunPower monitoring system that lets us track the performance of the system and see how each individual panel is working. Naturally, this system only delivers its data to some proprietary cloud system run by SunPower. Just as naturally, SunPower has gone bankrupt, and the monitoring system is now just a useless brick sitting on the wall.

...or at least it would be, had I not gone through the effort of integrating it with Home Assistant — a mildly difficult task involving hooking into a maintenance port on the device itself. So now I have the data out of the monitoring box stored on a local system, under my control, and I don't need to go scrambling for alternatives. I can obsess over my post-solstice data, waiting for production to reach decent levels again — that happens faster if I stare at it, I'm convinced.

Maybe there's something to this free software idea after all.

@corbet nice work!

@corbet this is so cool! Well, I mean, annoying circumstance with SunPower but a super cool workaround.

cc: @aphyr @geerlingguy @joeyh 👀↑↑ (Home Assistant / solar array integration!)

@corbet is this your solar production today?

@corbet This is exactly why our setup is a Sunsynk. It doesn't even need to be connected to the internet at all. Just chats modbus over a serial port.

There's much worse coming because some of the popular battery kit is totally cloud dependent not just for metrics and tied to Chinese clouds that if Taiwan v China goes boom will no doubt just go dark and is also very vulnerable to bankruptcies and enshittification

@corbet I did a similar thing, although my long term storage is InfluxDB. I've also now switched to an Enphase IQ gateway for monitoring the panels so I'll be harvesting data from that instead of the SunPower PVS.

@corbet awesome!!

@Jesse That was yesterday's data. Just about the low point for the year (not counting the days when the panels are covered with snow, of course).

@corbet that's quite good still. We did have some sun shine today and got no snow at the moment. I got 7.5kWp at my house roof. Living in shoutern Finland. Here is my data from today.

@corbet

I have a small off-grid solar power system. I know there are tools to monitor energy usage and battery charge state and I feel vaguely guilty that I'm not using them, but all I ever do is check the SOC on each battery if I get several cloudy days in a row.

@corbet Oh wow, awesome. Love that view as well, with the solar energy overlaid. Also, damn, TIL that SunPower went under. They had been around for a while (1985).

@corbet
I am up against this as well and would love a step by step tutorial on how to do this. The sunpower website quit working, the cellphone version still works somewhat but i would love this as an alternative. Any help would be appreciated.

@selje For the most part, I followed these instructions here:

https://starreveld.com/PVS6%20Access%20and%20API.pdf

Rather than putting an rPi system in the box, though, I just ran the Ethernet cable to a system I had with both wireless and wired interfaces; the WiFi sits on the home net, while the wired interface does DHCP to get an address from the SunPower box, then polls it to get the data out.

Once that was set up, getting it into Home Assistant was mostly a matter of installing the integration. Figuring out which power signals belonged to which panel took a while; if you don't have it yet, use the SunPower app to make a map of the serial number for each panel and its location.

I'm debating whether to stick with this system, or to take up Enphase on its offer and swap out the SunPower box entirely. The Enphase monitor would be a supported product, and it seemingly has much better Home Assistant support.

@corbet
Thank you , will the Enphase work with your existing sunpower setup, do you know what the cost would be by chance. I am still hopeful that sunpower will come out of bankruptcy with a new owner and restore the system I paid good money for...
Signed a dissatisfied SunPower Customer 🙄

@selje Enphase info is here:

https://enphase.com/support/sunpower

They informed me that a replacement system would be $700, seemingly including installation. It'll be a little while before I can generate enthusiasm for spending that money, certainly...

Some new form of SunPower resurrecting the current hardware would be nice. I'd say that the chances of them making it work again without demanding more money are pretty small, though. Such is the world we live in - we only *think* we own that device...

@corbet
Jonathan,
thanks again for the info.
I was dubious from the start about their remote information system, I asked the installers why they didn't just put in a small webserver app with some memory storage that could broadcast the info over local wifi with a 192.168 address I could track myself. After all you can get a terabyte on a thumbdrive for less that $40.00. Despite those misgivings I like their hardware, panels and battery backup system.
I may end up with the enphase solution. 😉

@corbet that reminds me of Bruce Sterling's "Heavy Weather". In that book the whole world has gone to shit due to climate change and protagonists are basically rogue meteorologists who exclusively use open source software because nothing else works anymore.

Come to think of it I don't remember anything about the book other than people discussing some software or some such they're recompiling on their airtight laptop.

@corbet
Excellent.
\me adds this to the ToDo list

@kevin @corbet Enphase cut off my purely-local stats monitoring and will not restore it, which is bad.

@corbet @selje Given that Enphase cut off my local stats monitoring in August and will not restore it, are you jumping from frying pan to fire?

@DamonHD @kevin So how does Enphase cut off access to a local resource like that? Have they said why such a thing would happen?

@DamonHD @corbet
Interesting, I just talked to my installer of my sunpower system. They told me that they are now installing Enphase monitoring on all their new system installs. That it would cost me $700 to switch over but that it would not monitor my battery back up system, just the solar panel health. Geez little donny is only in office one day and already the wheels are coming off... 🤔 😉 😜
it would be nice to have a reliable partner or just give me the tools to monitor and track it myself.

@corbet When I moved out of my last place, getting the solar monitoring moved over to the new owners was a right hassle. Luckily the installer acted as a mediator and got the account set up. There needs to be a better way.

@corbet I was thinking this with our system, if the inverter manufacturer goes bust the systems controls will be useless, and they have had to reset them remotely twice in under a year so its a bit worring.

@corbet do you happen to have two arrays of panels? I'm curious about the two colors in the solar production chart.

@corbet I love this... 🙂

@corbet @kevin @DamonHD We had a house with an Enphase unit (I think an Envoy) and I recall that they have to give you an access token (like a key) to access the unit's API. The tokens expire after 6 months, I think.

I was also brushed off and even scoffed at when voicing concerns about having any of this high-powered (10KW peak output) equipment sitting on the Internet. (I am of a school of thought that considers the usual nostrums about security to lack credibility.)

@tasket @corbet @kevin It used to be possible to simply poll /production.json on the Envoy. Now indeed you need to get some kind of token which forces remote access at least periodically, and would be a whole bunch of rework for me and is wasted time and broken integrations already.