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  • 4 min read

☀️ Setting up local access to a Solis Solar Inverter

Abstract

Setting up local access to a Solis inverter

solis_inverter

The problem with a Solis inverter

As energy is expensive in Europe, my goal is to manage my home energy usage as efficient as possible. One aspect of this is managing my solar inverter (and battery). To do this, I am currently controlling the inverter through SolisCloud integration in Home Assistant. For basic usage, this solution is perfect to control my Solis inverter (S5-EH1P5K-L) with a S3-WIFI-ST datalogger. The downside of this solution is that it is using the Solis API. The polling intervals are around 5 minutes, which leaves much to be desired when it comes to smart automations. After looking up multiple possible solutions, I ended up using a couple of RS485 Waveshare modules to hijack the communication between the inverter and the datalogger stick. This guide does an excellent job of explaining how it works and how it set it up. This gave me full local control in combination with the Solis Modbus integration in Home Assistant A bonus of this solution is that I am still able to use SolisCloud.

This blog posts aims to elaborate some of the instructions and show off some images after playing around with it myself.

  • 8 min read

🗄️ My own Google service at home

Abstract

I recently found a Google-branded server, and decided to repurpose it.

google_server

What is it?

Doing some cleanup in a datacenter, one of the servers that was supposed to be thrown away stood out to me. A bright yellow server with Google branding on this. My curiosity got the better of me and I took it home to find out what it was.

  • 4 min read

🖥️ A custom server rack screen

Abstract

I created a monitoring screen to place in my server rack. The screen is used to display different server statistics such as cpu, ram, disk, etc. usage for my servers (Proxmox, Unraid,..). To accomplish this, I got a Raspberry Pi with a screen. My server statistics are gathered via different Home Assistant integrations. Alternatively, you could use something like Grafana.

custom_rack_screen