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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 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.

DamonHD

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

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

@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.