nonspecialist

A (quick?) record of the process of getting things upgraded.

We already had about 5kW of solar panels, and a 5kW SolarEdge inverter, installed by the previous owners of the house. I'd registered as a SolarEdge installer, taken the tests, and gained access to the system, not because I wanted to mess with it, but because I wanted to understand and perhaps monitor it better. That's kind of my thing.

Then I got an email from SolarEdge, offering a free inverter upgrade to 10kW. That's hard to pass up, and of course it turned into a conversation about batteries; and we already have an EV, should we get a better charger; and so on.

TL;DR we did. That brings us to today.

Things discovered during the install

1. The breaker for the cable from the street is oversized for the current capacity of the cable. It's apparently a 6mm cable, and that works out to be rated max 79A before it starts melting, with a voltage drop of over 2.3% if that much current were pulled. The breaker is 80A. As a result, the sparky doing the install limited the disconnect breaker to 32A. This will become relevant later.
2. We had to get creative with the battery location, because none of the south-facing walls had enough space with all the random plumbing that festoons them. North-facing requires an awning to keep summer sun off the batteries; so we ended up putting them at the end of the carport (which is quite deep), but they have to be protected with Giant Yellow Safety bollards, which makes things look rather industrial.

I can apparently call United Energy and schedule an upgrade of the cable, at which point we can upgrade the weensy 32A breaker again.

The EV Charger

We've been using the “granny charger”, the plug-in one that we got with the car some ... 4 years ago. It's been fine, but it's not fast. Upgrading to one that was smarter would allow us to charger faster, and be more clever about which power went into the car vs into the batteries.

The first time we used it, we popped the breaker. The current draw went up to 7.7kW from the grid, and things went dark instantly.

Yay, the breakers work. Boo, 32A is not a lot.

Home Assistant

There are integrations for Home Assistant for the SolarEdge EV Charger; but not for this one, which is the SolarEdge One EV Charger.

It's on the network (WiFi), and I can see it there, and I can see it's talking to ev.wevo.energy in AWS eu-central-1 (Frankfurt) but it doesn't have any ports open locally.

Further digging (by sniffing traffic at startup) shows that it's actually a NexBlue Edge smart charger with a different coat on (and, presumably different firmware). SolarEdge bought Wevo outright in 2024, so it makes sense that the charger is phoning home there.

Because it's not listening locally (at least, not once it's up and running), I can't integrate to it directly and will have to go via a cloud service, which makes me rather sad.

For now, this will have to be a “save for later” owing to the next thing.

SolarEdge Monitoring

I mentioned above that I'm a registered SolarEdge installer. Not because I install systems, but because it was the simplest way to get access to my own, and to do it safely.

This meant that I had our “site” registered, and I had installer access to it; however, once the upgrade was done, I lost that access — the folks who did the upgrade, battery install, etc have apparently taken it over.

I've sent them an email, and I expect they'll be pretty forthcoming about the reasons; for now, I would be OK with just “owner” access again. Situation pending.

What it means though is that I only have the local TCP Modbus integration to the inverter still going, and that's because I turned it on before I lost access. I can't investigate the API back through the monitoring site, although there are multiple implementations already that do so, because I can't see anything in the monitoring portal any more.

I guess this will be a “save for later” thing too.