Solar12

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this story, we’ll explore HACS (Home Assistant Community Store), why it’s a game-changer, and how to get started with it.