Kia ora,
I have a plain vanilla HomeAssistant install (HAOS) which I keep fairly up to date and yesterday I was looking around at Integrations in it. Suddenly I spotted some Victron integrations so I decided to try to use them. I wanted to report that so far, they are working great!
I have an off grid EasySolar II GS 5000 which shows up correctly as the 3 component devices: a GX controller, a SmartSolar charger and a MultiPlus II inverter. They all expose lots of properties and as far as I can see, they all show correct values. I also have a BMV-700 monitoring one bunch of AGM batteries; again, I get the same results as I would via the venus console or VRM.
So whoever did that, hats off to you! I was aware there was some way to do at least some of this via MQTT but I never got into implementing it. This was unbelievably easy.
I have not looked yet toward HomeAssistant actually sending instructions to EasySolar, but I have a use case for it.
The EasySolar (I presume just the MultiPlus component) has the PV Inverter wizard in use. I have a “dumb” SMA PV inverter whose output is connected to the MultiPlus AC Out 1 (L1). When MultiPlus senses the batteries are charged, it increases the AC Out frequency to about 51.4 Hz and the SMA reduces its output accordingly. The gotcha is that sometimes the AC out frequency stays latched high even when the battery charge has dropped significantly- some built in hysteresis I suppose. Sometimes it’s enough to put a 2 kW load onto the AC Out 1, but sometimes that’s not enough. Right now my only option then is to use the console to “Restart the VE.Bus System” which is rarely convenient because it interrupts power to everything powered by the MultiPlus. It would be nice if there was a programmatic way to tell the Multiplus that it’s safe now to reduce the AC Out frequency without such a drastic reset.
Does anyone have such a trick up their sleeve?
Best, Graham