Hey there - not sure why I was surprised to see the number of solar posts out there asking about Hubitat integration but I figured I would share the great experience that I have had with my SolArk & Hubitat marriage. My goal was to have grid independence, support my home and my car's usage, and to sell solar production during peak hours and as a Hubitat user to have the system connected to my smart home, of course
But as you guessed, there wasn't any support for SolArk on Hubitat at the time. However, I saw that SolArk had an API with documentation that I could tap - and besides I'd done enough coding with APIs before. So I did it! And to be honest, the main take-away for me; Hubitat has a lot of great untapped device parameters that could be used for a ton of totally interesting API integrations. . .
For total debutants, an inverter - this is basically a power-transformer-substation in your garage, ideal for monitoring everything from your batteries, to Solar, to home usage, and grid feed because it does the necessary DC/AC power conversions and tracks the energy output.
We have an all-in-one inverter called a SolArk 12K. It has a 9kw limit on DC conversions, so if I run my 3.8kw AC and 6.0kw car charger together, so for math buffs voila that's just 800w watts from the Grid. Otherwise, we have 8kw solar panels and a 38kwh battery plugged in too. We are pretty much off the grid and I drive ~ 400miles a week, while most of the late afternoon production is sold to the grid at peak rates. Winter is a more frugal time for solar; with a system this size our 4bd home basically draws no power, so we pay our gas heater and approx 30-60% of the car charger usage at a rate of about 6.6 cents per mile charged on the grid. I'm pretty sure there have been a couple outages in our neighborhood so far, we never notice them but occasionally there is a .3 second energy drop when the grid supply is cut...
What do I do with my data? Dashboards, sure. But mainly I have rules for controlling the smart-switch on the car charger so that my home doesn't draw unnecessarily from the grid and I always have enough power for the home if we are disconnected totally in the event of an outage.
This SolArk Inverter driver I wrote is available on HPM - and for that ton of totally interesting API integrations. . . KEEP LOOKING for other services with an API to tap for home automation - it can probably be done with Hubitat. With error handling and token handling framework, I would use this driver as a template for other API reporting integrations too