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   Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Jan-2025 02:49:53 JST Jonathan Corbet
   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.
   • Alexandre Oliva (moving to @lxo@snac.lx.oliva.nom.br) likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Jan-2025 05:42:03 JST Jonathan Corbet

     in reply to

     • Jesse
     @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).
   • Embed this notice
     Jesse (jesse@mastodontti.fi)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Jan-2025 05:42:05 JST Jesse

     in reply to

     @corbet is this your solar production today?

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     selje 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 🇳🇴 🇮🇪 (selje@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Jan-2025 07:39:49 JST selje 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 🇳🇴 🇮🇪

     in reply to

     @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.

   • Embed this notice
     Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Jan-2025 07:39:49 JST Jonathan Corbet

     in reply to

     • selje 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 🇳🇴 🇮🇪
     @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.
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     selje 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 🇳🇴 🇮🇪 (selje@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Jan-2025 07:55:26 JST selje 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 🇳🇴 🇮🇪

     in reply to

     @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 🙄

   • Embed this notice
     Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Jan-2025 07:55:26 JST Jonathan Corbet

     in reply to

     • selje 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 🇳🇴 🇮🇪
     @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...