Sungrow + Tibber to save money 💴 (and the planet) 🌍

Goal

Charge your home battery in cheap Tibber hours, consume from the grid in average price times, consume from home battery in expensive hours.

In this example, the result we want to achieve would look like this. The battery has been charged during the cheapest hours 2:00-4:00, consumed in the expensive hours 8:00-21:00, and the rest of the day battery was bypassed and the grid powered the house at a relatively low price where a charge-discharge battery cycle would not pay off.

Manual Alternative

At first I used the Sungrow app iSolarCloud. I manually scheduled time windows to charge and discharge. Look for Forced Charging, Battery Use Time, Weekend Discharging in the app

Prerequisites

• https://github.com/mkaiser/Sungrow-SHx-Inverter-Modbus-Home-Assistant
• https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/tibber

Simulate first

Create the automation automation-simulate.yaml. Have no fear since for now it only posts notifications to your Home Assistant UI, we will extend this simulation mode with real action in next section. To install, create a new Automation in the UI, switch to yaml view, and copy&paste. If you want to learn more about creating Automations, read the documentation.

Action!

Make your automation do something by calling the scripts that come with the Sungrow modbus integration from the Prerequisites section: automation-productive.yaml. If you want to debug it, you can check the Traces of your Automation.

Add further conditions to refine

Here is automation-extended.yaml with the following extensions:

• I realized, the battery is not charged while in bypass mode, so I use the already existing sensor exporting_power as trigger.
• And I realized in some weeks I do not want to charge my battery from the grid, the sun delivers enough if I consume from the battery only in expensive hours, so I added a toggle battery_recharge_when_cheap_tibber_price. Creating a plain new toggle is easily done as https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/input_boolean/, remember to use the same name as I did or change it in your automation yaml.

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