Energy16

How I turned raw inverter registers into a real Home Assistant energy dashboard: reading, monitoring and acting on solar surplus, battery and switching.

How I run Shelly Plus 1PM/2PM behind my wall switches in Home Assistant — fully local switching plus per-channel energy metering, no cloud, physical switch kept.

Read every Huawei SUN2000 register straight into Home Assistant with the built-in modbus platform — no custom component that breaks on upgrade. A complete register-to-YAML map with the right data_type, scale, device_class and state_class for the Energy Dashboard.

The Huawei SUN2000 SDongle accepts only one Modbus-TCP connection. Instead of an add-on, I wrote a ~300-line asyncio caching proxy that polls the dongle once every 10s and serves the registers to Home Assistant, AC·THOR and evcc at the same time. Full MBAP parsing, register batching and an in-memory cache.

I wired an AC·THOR 9s into Home Assistant to dump PV surplus into the hot-water tank — then the device refused every Modbus write. Here's the read-local, write-cloud fix.

My inverter cloud shows self-consumption and autarky as pretty graphs. Home Assistant gives you raw counters. Here's how I rebuilt those numbers as template sensors I own.

My Huawei SDongle accepts exactly one Modbus connection — but Home Assistant, the AC·THOR and evcc all want the inverter's data. Here's the ~300-line asyncio cache server I wrote to feed all of them from a single quiet poll.

A failure-mode playbook for a self-built Modbus cache proxy in Home Assistant: reconnect with backoff, stale-cache detection that HA can alert on, per-batch and client timeouts, and 50 ms spacing for a slow SDongle — so the proxy never silently serves zeros after a nightly drop or firmware reboot.

A caching Modbus proxy only solves reads. Here is the write-through path: pass FC6 register writes straight to the inverter on a short-lived connection, echo the response, return proper Modbus exceptions — so you can force-charge the battery or set power limits over a single shared connection.

Reading the AC·THOR 9s over Modbus TCP works, but writing is blocked at the device. Here's how I switched control to the undocumented my-PV Cloud API as a Home Assistant shell_command, with tested parameters and the gotchas nobody mentions.

A Home Assistant automation that compares your two MPPT strings and warns you the moment one drifts — early warning for shading, a dead module or a loose MC4 connector, with a night-time false-alarm guard.

How I update a Docker-based Home Assistant to a new version without breaking my smart home: full backup, update custom components first against the old core, recreate the container instead of in-place, note the image ID for a real rollback, and a post-update checklist.

A reproducible Home Assistant automation: a KNX window contact switches that room's thermostat to building_protection (frost guard) when it opens and back to comfort when it closes — with a 5-second debounce that stops the false triggers most tutorials ignore.

Making KNX motion sensors drive lights that feel like the room is paying attention — the real trick is one extra group address, not a cleverer trigger.

The HACS integrations I actually run in Home Assistant – Huawei Solar, Tapo cameras, button-card and more – plus the community must-haves worth knowing.

Install HACS in Home Assistant step by step: the Get HACS add-on (HAOS), the one-line installer (Container/Core), GitHub authorization, and common fixes.