SolarEdge Modbus

The SolarEdge Modbus integrationIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] connects Home Assistant to your SolarEdge solar inverter over your own network, using the Modbus TCP interface built into the inverter. There is no account, no API key, and no cloud service involved, so your solar production keeps arriving in Home Assistant even when your internet connection is down.

Because it talks to the inverter directly, readings arrive every few seconds instead of every few minutes. That makes it a good source for the Energy dashboard and for automations that respond to what your panels are producing right now.

If you would rather use SolarEdge’s cloud service, for example to see how each individual panel is doing, use the SolarEdge integration instead. You can use both at the same time.

Use cases

Reading the inverter directly, rather than through SolarEdge’s cloud, is worth it for a few things in particular:

• Seeing your production as it happens. Values arrive every few seconds, which is fast enough to watch a cloud pass over your roof, and they keep arriving when your internet connection is unavailable.
• Putting solar on the Energy dashboard. Production, and with a meter also what you take from the grid and send back to it, and with a battery what goes in and out of it.
• Running appliances on your own power. An automation that starts the dishwasher, the washing machine or a car charger when production is high enough, rather than at a fixed time.
• Noticing when something is wrong. An inverter that has stopped producing is easy to miss for weeks; a fault here is a state you can automate on the same day.
• Changing what the installation does. The export limit, how the battery charges, and what the inverter may deliver, without an installer visit or the SolarEdge app.

Supported devices

This integration has been tested with, or reported to work on, the following inverters:

• SE4K
• SE5000H
• SE8000H
• SE10K
• SE10000H
• SE15K
• SE17K

Both single-phase and three-phase inverters are covered by that list. Any SolarEdge inverter that offers Modbus TCP should work, whether or not it is listed.

Your inverter reports itself as a part number, such as SE17K-RW0T0BNN4. The part before the dash is the model, and the rest describes the region it was built for and the options it was built with. An inverter of the same model as one in the list therefore works the same way, regardless of what comes after the dash.

Modbus TCP is available on inverters that have a network connection. If you cannot find the setting on your inverter, updating the inverter firmware usually adds it.

An inverter without a network port can be reached over RS485 instead, either wired to a serial port on the machine running Home Assistant, or through a Modbus TCP bridge such as a serial-to-network adapter.

Unsupported devices

The following devices are not supported:

• SolarEdge EV chargers, such as the SE-EV-SA-US-40P. They answer as a Modbus device, but serve no measurements. Home Assistant tells you when it finds one during setup.

Prerequisites

An inverter is reached over your network or over RS485, and either way Modbus has to be turned on at the inverter itself first. How you get there depends on whether your inverter has a display.

Enabling Modbus TCP sets the port to 1502. The device ID of the inverter is 1, unless you gave it another one yourself.

For a network connection, you also need the hostname or IP address of the inverter. Giving it a fixed address in your router keeps Home Assistant pointed at the right device.

For an RS485 connection, set the protocol of the inverter’s RS485 port to SunSpec (Non-SE Logger) in the same communication settings, note its baud rate (115200 unless it was changed), and know which serial port of your machine the bus is wired to.

Configuration

To add the SolarEdge Modbus device to your Home Assistant instance, use this My button:

SolarEdge Modbus can be auto-discovered by Home Assistant. If an instance was found, it will be shown as Discovered. You can then set it up right away.

Setting up starts by picking how the inverter is reached, Network (Modbus TCP) or Serial (RS485). A discovered inverter skips that question: it announced itself over the network.

For a network connection:

For a serial connection:

The above configuration can also be adjusted later via Settings > Devices & services, select and select Reconfigure.

Supported functionality

Your inverter is added as a device, with any energy meter or battery wired to it as a device of its own beneath it. Home Assistant reads the serial numbers during setup and uses those to recognize the hardware, so moving an inverter to another address does not create a second device, and replacing a meter does not hand the new one the old one’s history.

Inverter sensors

• Power: The AC power the inverter is feeding into your home right now. The Energy dashboard uses this one for live power flow.
• Energy: The total energy the inverter has produced since it was installed. This is the sensor to use for solar production on the Energy dashboard.
• Current: The AC current the inverter is delivering.
• Current phase A, Current phase B, Current phase C: The current per phase. Only added for inverters that report per phase.
• DC power: The power coming in from your solar panels.
• DC current: The current coming in from your solar panels.
• Temperature: The temperature of the inverter’s heatsink. The inverter reports no temperature while it is asleep, so this is unknown at night.
• Status: What the inverter is doing: Off, Sleeping, Starting, Producing, Throttled, Shutting down, Fault, or Standby. In automations and templates, a state goes by its own value rather than the name shown here, so Shutting down is shutting_down.

The following sensors are added, but disabled. They are useful for troubleshooting or for a detailed look at your installation, and there are a lot of them, so they stay out of the way until you need them. To use one, enable it in the entity’s settings.

• Voltage, and per phase Voltage phase A-B, Voltage phase B-C, Voltage phase C-A, Voltage phase A-N, Voltage phase B-N, and Voltage phase C-N: The AC voltage. Which of these your inverter reports depends on how it is wired.
• DC voltage: The voltage coming in from your solar panels.
• Frequency: The frequency of the grid the inverter is connected to.
• Apparent power, Reactive power, and Power factor: How the inverter’s output relates to the grid.

Meter sensors

An energy meter measures what passes through it, which is what the inverter cannot see: what your home takes from the grid, and what it sends back. Every meter attached to the inverter gets a device named after its place on it, Meter 1 through Meter 3, with its own sensors.

• Power: What the meter measures right now.
• Energy imported and Energy exported: The totals since the meter was installed. These are the sensors for the grid on the Energy dashboard.
• Current: The current through the meter.
• Per phase: Power and current for each phase the meter measures. A split-phase meter has two phases rather than three.

The following sensors are added, but disabled, the same way the inverter’s are. To use one, enable it in the entity’s settings.

• Voltage, and per phase Voltage phase A-N, Voltage phase B-N, Voltage phase C-N, Voltage phase A-B, Voltage phase B-C, and Voltage phase C-A: The AC voltage. Which of these exist depends on the meter: a delta meter has no neutral, so it measures nothing against one.
• Frequency: The frequency of the grid the meter sits on.
• Apparent power, Reactive power, and Power factor: How what the meter measures relates to the grid.
• Energy imported and Energy exported per phase: The totals for each phase the meter measures.

Battery sensors

A battery attached to the inverter gets a device named after its place on it, Battery 1 through Battery 3, with what it holds and what it is doing with it.

• State of energy: How full the battery is, as a percentage.
• Available energy: What is in the battery right now.
• Energy imported and Energy exported: The totals charged into and discharged from the battery. These are the sensors for the battery on the Energy dashboard.
• Status: What the battery is doing: Off, Standby, Initializing, Charging, Discharging, Fault, Preserving charge, Idle, or Power saving.
• State of health: What is left of the battery’s original capacity, as a percentage.
• DC power and DC current: What flows between the battery and the inverter. Negative while it is charging.
• Temperature: How warm the pack is on average.

The following sensors are added, but disabled. To use one, enable it in the entity’s settings.

• Usable capacity and Rated energy: What the battery can hold as configured, and what it was rated for when it was built.
• DC voltage: The voltage between the battery and the inverter.
• Maximum charge power and Maximum discharge power, and their peak counterparts: What the battery allows, continuously and in bursts.
• Maximum temperature: The warmest cell in the pack.

Storage state of charge

Not every inverter lets Home Assistant read its battery over Modbus. A number of Home Hub inverters keep those registers to themselves, so no battery device appears for them. Some of those do report their storage a second way, and then a single sensor is added to the inverter itself:

• Storage state of charge: How full the attached storage is, as a percentage.

This is all that is available that way. There is no capacity, health, or power to go with it, because the inverter does not report those here.

It only appears when your installer has set the inverter to a grid profile that supports IEEE 1547-2018, and when no battery device was found. Where there is a battery device, that one is used instead: it reports far more, and it is tied to the battery’s own serial number.

An inverter with no battery attached reports 0% here, so the sensor is left out when that is what the inverter says at startup.

Binary sensors

• Problem: On when the inverter reports a fault, so an automation can tell you the same day rather than at the end of the month.
• Charging: On while a battery is taking charge. Home Assistant’s battery-charging triggers and conditions look at this rather than at the status sensor, so this is the one to use for them.
• On grid: Whether the inverter is connected to the grid. Only added for inverter firmware that reports it.

Numbers

The inverter holds settings of its own, which this integration can change as well as read. They sit under the inverter’s configuration rather than with its measurements.

• Backup reserve: How much of the battery is kept back for a power cut, as a percentage.
• Storage charge limit and Storage discharge limit: How fast the battery is allowed to charge and discharge.
• Site export limit: How much the site may feed back to the grid.
• External production maximum: What other production at the site can deliver, which the inverter needs to know to keep the site within its export limit.
• Active power limit: How much of its capacity the inverter may use, as a percentage.
• Power factor setpoint: The cos phi the inverter aims for. Disabled by default, since it is an installer setting that a site rarely needs to move.

Selects

• Storage control mode: What the battery does. Maximize self-consumption keeps your own production at home, Time of use follows a schedule set on the inverter, Backup only keeps the battery for a power cut, and Remote control hands the decision to whatever writes the command mode below.
• Storage default mode and Storage command mode: What the battery is told to do, and what it falls back to when a remote command times out. The options range from charging out of solar or the grid to discharging to cover your own use or to export.
• Storage AC charge policy: Whether, and how much, the battery may charge from the grid rather than from the panels.
• Export limitation: How the site limits what it feeds back to the grid. Production control limits the inverter itself; the meter-based options measure at the connection point and need a meter, so they are only offered when one is attached. Whatever the inverter is set to is always offered, even when the hardware for it is missing, since that is what the register says.
• Export limit type: Whether the export limit counts per phase or as a total. Disabled by default.

Switches

These switches are flags on the export control. An installer sets them to describe the site, and they are disabled by default.

• External production: Tells the inverter there is production at the site that it cannot see itself, so it can keep the whole site within its export limit.
• Negative site limit: Lets the site limit go below zero, which turns it into a minimum import rather than a maximum export. It needs a meter at the connection point to mean anything.

Energy dashboard

Your inverter’s production fits straight into the Energy dashboard, next to what your home consumes.

1. Go to Settings > Dashboards > Energy.
2. Under Solar panels, select Add solar production.
3. For Solar production energy, select the inverter’s Energy sensor.
4. For Solar production power, select the inverter’s Power sensor. This one is optional, and it is what the live power flow card and the Now tab use to show your production as it happens.
5. Select Save.

Home Assistant records long-term statistics for the Energy sensor from the moment the entity appears, so the dashboard also fills in the days before you added it here.

The Electricity grid section needs a meter, since the inverter measures what it produces and not what your home takes from the grid or sends back to it. With a SolarEdge meter wired to the inverter, this integration provides that too:

1. Under Electricity grid, select Add grid connection.
2. For Grid consumption, select the meter’s Energy imported sensor.
3. For Return to grid, select the meter’s Energy exported sensor.
4. Select Save.

Without a meter, another energy monitor, such as one reading your utility meter, can fill those in instead.

A battery goes under Home battery storage in the same way:

1. Under Home battery storage, select Add battery system.
2. For Energy charged into the battery, select the battery’s Energy imported sensor.
3. For Energy discharged from the battery, select its Energy exported sensor.
4. For Battery state of charge sensor, select its State of energy sensor.
5. Select Save.

SolarEdge Modbus automation examples

Your inverter knows more about your solar production than a monthly report ever will. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

Automation: get a notification when the inverter reports a fault

A solar installation on the roof is easy to forget about, and an inverter that has stopped producing costs you money every sunny hour. This automation sends a notification the moment the inverter reports a fault, so you find out on the same day instead of on your next bill.

• Trigger: Problem turned on
• Action: Send a notification message
  • Target: My Device (notify.my_device)

alias: "Solar inverter fault"
triggers:
  - trigger: state
    entity_id: binary_sensor.solaredge_se10000h_problem
    to: "on"
actions:
  - action: notify.send_message
    target:
      entity_id: notify.my_device
    data:
      message: >
        The solar inverter reports a fault and has stopped producing.

Automation: run the dishwasher on your own solar power

Appliances that do not care when they run are the cheapest way to use your own production instead of selling it. This automation starts the dishwasher once your panels have been producing more than 2 kW for ten minutes, which is long enough to know it is not a passing gap in the clouds.

• Trigger: Power above 2000 for 10 minutes
• Action: Turn on the dishwasher

alias: "Dishwasher on solar power"
triggers:
  - trigger: numeric_state
    entity_id: sensor.solaredge_se10000h_power
    above: 2000
    for: "00:10:00"
actions:
  - action: switch.turn_on
    target:
      entity_id: switch.dishwasher

Data updates

The SolarEdge Modbus integration pollsData polling is the process of querying a device or service at regular intervals to check for updates or retrieve data. By defining a custom polling interval, you can control how frequently your system checks for new data, which can help optimize performance and reduce unnecessary network traffic. [Learn more] the inverter, and anything wired to it, every 10 seconds. The inverter’s settings are read every 5 minutes instead: they only move when something writes them, and every read costs a slot on a connection that has few to give.

Every 15 minutes, Home Assistant also asks the inverter what is connected. If it detects that a meter or battery was added or removed, it reloads the integration automatically.

Home Assistant keeps one Modbus connection per address and shares it between the integrations that use it. If several inverters answer on the same address with different device IDs, for example because they are chained on one Modbus TCP bridge, they share a single connection instead of each opening their own.

A Modbus setup in your configuration.yamlThe configuration.yaml file is the main configuration file for Home Assistant. It lists the integrations to be loaded and their specific configurations. In some cases, the configuration needs to be edited manually directly in the configuration.yaml file. Most integrations can be configured in the UI. [Learn more] is separate from this. It opens its own connection to the inverter, which counts against the number of clients the inverter accepts.

If part of the installation does not answer a poll, only its entitiesAn entity represents a sensor, actor, or function in Home Assistant. Entities are used to monitor physical properties or to control other entities. An entity is usually part of a device or a service. [Learn more] become unavailable: a silent meter or battery leaves the inverter’s sensors alone. Home Assistant does not keep showing the last known reading as if it were current.

Known limitations

• Which of the inverter’s settings exist depends on the installation. Storage settings need a battery, and the export settings need the inverter to have them enabled; what is absent is simply not added.
• SolarEdge does not document the control registers, and not every firmware exposes them the same way. What a setting does is the inverter’s business, and it will refuse a value it does not accept.
• A meter or battery wired in or out while Home Assistant runs takes up to 15 minutes to appear or disappear, since that is how often the inverter is asked what is attached. Picking it up reloads the integration, so its entities are briefly unavailable. Reloading it yourself is quicker if you cannot wait.
• Modbus gives you what the inverter itself measures. Data per optimizer or per panel is only available through SolarEdge’s cloud service, which the SolarEdge integration uses.
• The Storage state of charge sensor is decided on at startup. A battery that reads exactly 0% right then is indistinguishable from an inverter with no battery at all, so the sensor is left out. Reload the integration once the battery has charged to add it.
• An inverter accepts a limited number of Modbus TCP connections at the same time. If another system on your network already polls the inverter, Home Assistant may not be able to connect.

Troubleshooting

Getting to what the inverter reports

The integration’s diagnostics carry everything the inverter says about itself and about the hardware wired to it, including meters and batteries, whether or not there are entities for them. To download them, go to Settings > Devices & services, select the integration, and use > Download diagnostics. Serial numbers are redacted.

Removing the integration

This integration follows standard integration removal. No extra steps are required.

To remove an integration instance from Home Assistant

1. Go to Settings > Devices & services and select the integration card.
2. From the list of devices, select the integration instance you want to remove.
3. Next to the entry, select the three dots menu. Then, select Delete.

The Modbus TCP setting stays enabled on the inverter. You can turn it off in the inverter’s own settings if nothing else uses it.