https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1017945/cf89397d6298b274/
'Electrification is good, but it is even better in the presence of abundant
electricity; thus, some years ago, an investment was made to cover my roof with
solar panels. The result was indeed abundant power, about double what the home
and the (non-Musky) electric vehicle actually used, which was a good thing. But
the situation could have been better.
The panels came with a monitoring system from a company called SunPower; it
collects data on panel performance and grid usage, reporting it all to some
system in the cloud somewhere. The company produced a reasonably competent app
that provided information about current and past performance, including data on
each individual panel. Naturally, the app was the only point of access to that
data, a fact which made me a bit nervous. Depending on a "free" cloud service
from some vendor often does not go well.
Sure enough, in 2024, SunPower went bankrupt. The company that acquired
SunPower's assets (among which are counted me and my data) goes by the name
SunStrong. This company recently informed me that free access to my data was
coming to an end; without a payment, the app would only provide basic
instantaneous data. In other words, the data generated by the solar panels,
which I own, is collected by the monitoring system, which I own, and sent off
to a cloud system, which I definitely do not own and which will hold my own
data hostage.
That, of course, is just the sort of situation I got into free software to
prevent. Fortunately, my early nervousness had led me to look for ways to
collect and hold that data locally; it is what drove me to install Home
Assistant. As it happens, the monitoring system does not readily give up its
information to the confused people who think they own it, but somebody out
there on the net figured out a way using a network port intended for
installation-time diagnostics, and documented it thoroughly. I was able to
solve the problem in a slightly simpler way (the machine running Home Assistant
has two network ports, so I was able to do without the intermediate Raspberry
Pi system), and have had full access to the data from the solar system ever
since.
After some of the inevitable fiddling (see the first article for some details),
the result is a far better interface to solar-related information than the app
ever provided. As one example, see the image to the right, plotting the output
from a sub-cluster of panels, clearly showing the effects of the partial
shading of two panels, even at the beginning of April. It has become easy to
see how well each part of the system is performing and, should a panel or its
inverter go bad someday, which panel is the problem will be immediately
apparent.
This kind of data should not be held hostage by some corporation that feels
empowered to alter the deal whenever it sees fit. Freedom from that situation
is, in my mind, one of the most compelling reasons to use a tool like Home
Assistant.'
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
