Hi!

What I* have:

  • a Raspberry Pi 3B
  • a solar PV system with Modbus output
  • a heat pump with Modbus output

What I want:

  • energy stats of the PV and the heat pump, going back for a few years, without needing cloud access
  • trigger the heat pump into overdrive when there’s excess solar
  • something that works well on a RPi 3B
  • usable phone frontend (not necessarily an app, but kinda like it)

What I tried: Home Assistant – which works but is very complicated and behaves rather funkily on the hardware. I suspect that putting a whole bunch of Docker containers on a lowly RPi is kind of a bad idea. But also, with Home Assistant, there appears to be a rather steep learning curve because there’s just so much stuff.

What I’ve superficially considered but haven’t tried: OpenHAB. Would be interested in learning if that’s better.

(* actually none of these are mine, but for the purposes of this post, let’s assume I have control of all this stuff.)