AC-Coupled energy storage inverter : Grid entities ?

[Barjea]

Hi,
I have an AC-Coupled energy storage inverter : Sofar ME3000SP connected to HA via Solarman
for entities I have

• Sofar Battery Charge / Discharge Power
• Sofar Consumption Power ( ie home Consumption )
  But
  for grid entities I only have these for Solarman
• Daily Power Sold
• Daily Power Bought
  both are state_class: total_increasing
  ie: I do not have access to current power bought or current power sold ( in my case it is not sold but given for free)
  I did set up custom entities : current state - previous state of these entities but it gives me delta for 5 seconds periodes ( not very useful)

How should I set up grid entities ?
up no now it has no entities

see attached files

[gcoan]

It sounds like you won't be able to get this working as it stands with just those sensors.

Battery charging/discharging and solar generation are power meters giving instantaneous Watts or kW of power.

Your Daily Power Sold and Bought are energy sensors giving a total in Watt-hours or kWh.

Whilst you can use a Riemann function in Home Assistant to convert power to energy, there isn't as far as I know any way of doing the reverse.

Looking at the solarman page https://github.com/StephanJoubert/home_assistant_solarman it looks like 'DEVE Total Grid Power' or 'DEVE External CT L1 Power' should be what you need. Have you tried these sensors? An AC coupled inverter must have a CT clamp on the grid supply and must be able to sense what power draw is in or out of your home in order to decide whether to charge or discharge the battery.

If you really can't get this information from solarman then one option could be to put a separate energy monitor and CT clamp onto your grid supply. I use a Shelly EM1 to monitor a non-HA connected Growatt inverter and the power draw of our extension and these both work fine.

[Barjea]

Yes there is a CT clamp on the grid and CT clamp on the output of the PV inverters and they are indeed used by the AC-coupled inverter to decide to charge or discharge the battery, import of export when needed.
I could add a ZigBee Meter Energy Power Monitor Clamp for $22

I am not using StepanJoubert but this one https://github.com/davidrapan/ha-solarman from davidrapan with almost the same operation. Data extracted from Sofar ME3000-SP does not include current import or export.

For now I created a custom sensor to deducted what Grid "behaviour".
but the AC-coupled inverter own consumption is not taken into account and is variable. ( now 30w)

• platform: template
  sensors:
  reseau_electrique:
  friendly_name: "Reseau électrique"
  unit_of_measurement: kWh
  value_template: >-
  {{ states('sensor.sofar_consumption_power') | float(0) |round(3) -
  states('sensor.sofar_pv_power') |float(0) |round (3) +
  states('sensor.sofar_battery_charge_discharge_power') | float(0) | round(3) }}
  icon_template: mdi:transmission-tower-export

[gcoan]

That would work, and I do something very similar myself to calculate my home consumption as I have two hybrid inverters that share the home power draw and thus don't have a single source of home consumption power reading.

A few observations though:

unit_of_measurement should be 'kW' or 'W', not kWh because its instantaneous power you are calculating not power over time

device_class should be set to 'power' and state_class to 'measurement'

Unless your inverter has a CT clamp around your home fusebox (mine doesn't), its highly likely that the inverter is having to calculate consumption power by much the same calculation as you have above (grid power + solar generation - battery charge + battery discharge) so by you working out grid power from the other sensors its a sort of calculation of a calculation. It would be better if you could read it directly from the inverter - maybe try the solarman I found if it works for your inverter type?

One thing to be aware of though is that this sensor will generate a lot of entries in your Home Assistant database as every single watt of change of one of the underlying sensors will cause the template to be recalculated. This will fill your database up a lot. I'm currently working through trimming my power sensors down in what they store to reduce my database size substantially.

A better solution is to do a time based trigger template, e.g. my home consumption sensor is updated every 5 minutes. It is a today's energy not instantaneous power sensor, but you hopefully get the idea of how it works:

- trigger:
    - platform: time_pattern
      minutes: "/5"
  sensor:
    - name: "calc_house_load_today_5_mins"
      unique_id: "calc_house_load_today_5_mins"
      unit_of_measurement: kWh
      state_class: total
      device_class: energy
      state: >
        {{ (states('sensor.sum_solar_energy_today')|float(0) 
          + states('sensor.sum_battery_discharge_today')|float(0)
          - states('sensor.sum_battery_charge_today')|float(0) 
          + states('sensor.grid_import_today')|float(0)
          - states('sensor.grid_export_today')|float(0) ) 
          | round(1)
        }}

[Barjea]

I could not make it work, since I am getting "Invalid config for 'sensor' at sensors.yaml, line 22: required key 'platform' not provided"
I gave-up searching, but I manage to understand Sofar ME-3000-sp entities from Solarman ( see attached diagram)