Home Assistant has a very nice energy management page, which really shine if you can plug into it sensors from your elecricity, water and gas meters.

If you are into DIY hardware and such, there are ways to tap into your gas and water meters as well, but i will not cover (yet) those here.

If you have a photovoltaic system, you can plug it in and collect all sort of energy data including consumption, grid import, grid export and so on.

Paired with the energy data from all your ZigBee and similar devices, it can be pretty useful to track and monitor your energy usages.

A photovoltaic (PV) system is composed of the following macro parts:

• Solar panels, which generate DC current
• Inverter, which converts the DC to 220AC (or whatever your country does)
• A Battery / Accumulators, that store the surplus energy generated by your panels
• A link to the grid, to measure and resell excell energy

The smart part of the system is the inverter, so you should note down your inverter brand and model. Consider also that often inverers are just rebranded from a more mainstream, or chinese, inverter brand and model.

In general, inverters are always connected to the internet for data collection and view on an app, some inverters also expose direct interfaces like MODBUS and such. If you are really lucky, you might have a SOLARMAN connected device.

SOLARMAN has developed a complete intelligent PV solution including hardware, software and data analysis to offer smart energy for global customers. In other words, it sits between your inverter MODBUS interface and the cloud, it read all your data and send it to your cloud online account.

The nice about a SOLARMAN device is that it exposes a local IP and port to which you can connect and grab the same data for Home Assistant, without having to actually require a cloud connection. Your data will still be shared to SOLARMAN cloud, but maybe you can prevent that by filtering out the connection at home router level, YMMV.

SOLARMAN integration is not provided by Home Assistant directly but by HACS. There seems to be one older, not maintained, integration and the newer, actively maintained HA Solarman integration.

Install and set it up, you will need to know your inverted IP address. You might want to assign a fixed IP at your DHCP level to ensure it doesnt change over time.

If your inverter brand/model is already supported, just choose the associated profile, and you are all set. If not, do not worry too much. I managed to ask my reseller technical support for the inverter MODBUS specification and i had been able to write my own integration file, which is now included in HA Solarman, for CHINT Hybrid inverters.

So if you manage to get your inverter MODBUS mappings, copy an existing profile and start hacking it until it works!

After your inverter is integrated into Home Assistant, go to the Energy dashboard and assign the following sensors:

• Inverter Total Energy Import: as grid consumption
• Inverter Total Energy Export: as return to grid
• Inverter Total Production: as solar panels production

And you can also add here all your consuming devices, the ones with smart plugs or similar.