hi hubitat friends, I have a balcony solar which charges back to the grid. I'm looking for a smart socket (either zigbee or zwave is good) which has power and energy meter function and supports chargeback. My aeotec wave sockets definitely not supporting 
any other ideas / solutions for the problem is appreciated.
I’m not sure i understand how charge back at the OUTlet would work. Maybe i’m misunderstanding what you are looking for. In my head it sounds like youre using a sucide cable.
1 Like
actually yes and no. Not sure if you've ever seen a balcony solar system. its a single solar panel + a micro inverter what you plug to a socket.
Technically the 230v is on the plug, so YES, it can be a "suicide cable" but this is how it works. It has some safety so if you accidentally touch the plug it cannot kill you. Its a totally standard stuff.
Yeah, i spec’ed out my balcony solar system a bit differently and went with using POE to bring solar power in my home. That sucide cable can be a murder cable too for the line man repairing power lines in the right conditions. I would be VERY, VERY careful with this. For your use case i dont think you will find what you are looking for as you are looking for it as for home automation they will all be outlets and essentially you want to measure a “power inlet”. I dont know of any zwave/zigbee/thread power inlets
To measure power you’ll want something like the Aeotec ZW095C3A60 Home Energy Meter Gen5 – 60A
If your doing 230v in, that’s a heavy duty load, i cant recommend this but maybe one of these could work.
https://thesmartcave.com/best-heavy-duty-smart-switch/
thanks. Yes you're right, this is a very bad solution (the suicide cable) But this is how this system is built. I was playing around with a simple shelly wave 1pm relay probably that will be the solution and will ditch the plug fully, I'm curious about your solution thoughsolar via POE= power over ethernet? Can you tell me more about it?
seems Shelly Qubino wave 1pm does the job. My panel is 320w so 16A on 230v is more than enough.
sending data via an influx logger I found in another chat, can now track generated energy.
What's your objective? Doesn't your power company show you the data?
In my situation i had already run ethernet to my balcony closet and was using it as my network closet. I chose Ecoflow for my battery solution cause they are known for making quiet gear.
I connected my DP3 to solar panels and AC in for redundant power. The 12 DC out to POE injectors then to ethernet cables to various rooms in my house. I chose DC out over AC to minimize the AC to DC conversions and the AC inverter on the DP3 is massive, so leaving it off makes the whole system more efficient. I use 1 USB C port to power a Jackery battery that powers all my network gear cause firmware updates causes all ports to power off on the Ecoflow gear.
In the the individual rooms i have POE to 12v splitters which are wired to the solar input of River 3 series batteries and are connected to AC power to also be redundant. As many devices as reasonable are connected to the R3 batteries. All batteries are set to DC charge the battery to 80% and AC covers the bottom 30% via the Ecoflow App.
Finally i use Home Assistant /ESPHome / bluetooth proxy to add the DP3 and R3 batteries for a single pane of glass monitoring and automation. ie When the battery of the DP3 is below 35% turn off the 12v DC port to maintain some juice to power the networking gear when solar production is low. Also turn the 12v DC port back on when it spends more then 15min above 59%
There are a few minor bugs i’m working out, but the system works. When I have good solar days my main battery stores solar power and redistributes it through out my house for storage and use. When solar output is low, everything is dual connected. So i just failover to AC, and “failback” to DC when solar generation is good again.
Of lessons learned the gauge of your ethernet cable is VERY importaint. i can get 50 - 72w continuous on whatever ethernet cables i ran years ago. If you want to guarantee 100w continuous you’ll want 22 AWG ethernet cable Cat 6 or better. Cat 8 is a bit over kill and it’s REALLY the gauge of the twisted pairs that matter for POE.
lessons learned part 2:
POE comes in 2 flavors Active and Passive. Active is more expensive but you have more options to control it, but maxes out at ~80w out. I’ve melted cables trying to fiquire out Passive POE use in this system and i’ve only found it in the 150w -320w range. Unless you're running good 22 AWG ethernet cables end to end, stick with active.
lessons learned part 3:
Ecoflow batteries are VERY chatty. All the sensors seam to update multiple times a second and there are a lot of sensors. I had to add CPU, Memory, and storage resources to my HA instance after adding my 2nd ecoflow battery. Bluetooth to Hubitat for more than 1 ecoflow battery would crater the hub. Its not designed for this much traffic.
