I'm a huge Hubitat fan but have been increasingly drawn to Home Assistant for integrating into my Home Solar and Battery system (Solax). Having automation of the Inverter and battery settings dependant upon tomorrow's forecast Solar makes a massive impact to the ROI of the system. (I have a Time of Use Tariff)
This is one area where Hubitat doesn't appear to be interested in having native support, possibly because must renewable devices are cloud based but I think that they are missing a huge opportunity.
I expect I'll get some push back from the community that no one system can master all use cases and that having a mix of Hubitat and Home Assistant is no bad thing, I get that... However, IMHO technology competition is like a game of Russian Roulette and I'm increasingly beginning to think that not supporting Solar Inverters and Battery Management Systems is putting another round in the chamber with relation to switching more and more use away from Hubitat.
To set the scene, here is my Home Assistant automation:
At 7pm each night change the target battery charge level, minimum discharge level and a few other settings are changed, based upon the solar forecast for my solar installation and also force discharge the batteries at the time when my Solar Export charge is the highest. With my level of technical knowledge, I wouldn't know where to start to create Rules to do this but it's only taken me about 2 -3 hrs to do this in Home Assistant. Hubitat has the building blocks but not the easy integration into the solar forecasting or the SolaX Inverter & Batteries.
Not trying to root for either system over the other. I've have a Hubitat for a long time and am very happy with it. I've looked at HA from time to time but never had the motivation to put together the required hardware system.
That said, I would guess an app could be written for Hubitat to do what you describe. Would it take the same time to write as for your HA, I don't know.
I'm a hardware guy. I've been building custom Zigbee devices and have always been able to write an app to do what I needed. I can see no functional limitation with a groovy app. I understand performing an FFT is likely not in the cards but of basic time and logic all the capability is there.
I’m a big fan of home automation and also renewables, so I agree that the two are a really great mix!
As @JohnRob indicates, the community is really good at filling those gaps.
As an example, I also have solar panels and my inverter (Fronius - has local integration option) doesn’t have a native driver. However, I was able to find a driver in the community for it, but that didn’t seem to work. With a friend that is quite versed in development, and also with the help of ChatGPT, we were able to make it work. Later, another community member made some updates and enhancements to it.
All this to say that one of the strengths of Hubitat is its community. When there are needs, eventually they will get filled.
As for why there isn’t a stock driver? First, as I understand it, the Hubitat devs need to have access to the required hardware to code their drivers. Pretty easy on small and relatively cheap devices, but not so much on an expensive device like a solar and battery system… And the other aspect is that they prioritize (and with very few exceptions, limit) their stock drivers to local ones.
That said, if you have connections with the hardware provider and they do have a local option, and would be willing to send Hubitat sample hardware - put them in touch to see if they would have the bandwidth to set something up.
Hi @Sebastien The integration protocol is Modbus, which is not SolaX specific. As you say, I think that the type of person interested in Home Automation will have a large overlap with Home Renewables. I've found a few posts about people asking for this integration but I don't see anything currently available.
SolaX don't have a local option and their App is also Cloud based.
Agreed @JohnRob. I only have my Home Renewables controlled by HA, everything else is within Hubitat and that's the way I'd prefer it to stay. I'm not going away from Hubitat and hope that I didn't imply that this was the direction that I intend to move towards.
I just think that Home renewables is increasingly about the software involved as well as the inverter and battery hardware and I think that stable software control of Home Renewables within Hubitat could well be a good differentiator for Hubitat.
Hi @simon.angell was not suggesting your approach was flawed because you chose not to use Hubitat, but that Hubitat "could" provide such support if an application was authored.
As for (what I believe) your goal requires interaction with the internet, I have no issue with that. Currently my only internet required function is for weather. I have no issue with this. I do get annoyed my ecobee thermostat requires the internet but overall I'm content that my Hubitat hub will continued to perform the core functions without an internet connection.
BTW I'm impressed with your system. Here in the US (I assume your in UK or at least EU) we don't have a lot of solar with batteries.
We have extensive Time of Use tariffs in the UK, where we have different Import and Export prices per kW depending on the Grid Load and time of day across a 24hr time period. This enables me to charge my batteries at a cheap import tariff time slot and then export back to the grid when grid demand is high for a higher export tariff.
HA has a local solution through Home Kit integration for this as well. It is the only reason I added Home assistant to my mix. I have no issue running limited HA integrations that I can then connect to Hubitat using helpers and the HA-HE integration to maximize local control.
Since the initial ecobee integration, I have added the My Subaru app and a few other local integrations to HA that HE doesn't have. Using helpers that talk to HE and trigger HA routines, I find that HA and HE compliment each other really well and each have strengths that lessen the weaknesses of the other (and "weakness" may be an over statement)
