We have built a simple integration to Solis Cloud Solar Inverters to pull real-time data and interact with your SmartThings home automation ecosystem.
As a test we thought we would wire up a SmartThings relay to turn on an electric immersion heater when given conditions were met. Namely, was the weather sufficiently clear with no clouds, was there sufficient solar being generated, was it between sun rise and sunset and was the battery of a sufficient level.
The below image shows the immersion heater coming on at 12 noon for the first time when the battery reached 50% SOC. Our Azure function then ran every 10 minutes after to decide whether to keep the immersion heater on or turn it off. Due to this setup having no gas and therefore relying on an oil fed boiler to heat water, it was more beneficial to use electricity being generated by this plant to heat water using the immersion heater to save on oil, be more efficient with the electricity being generated and to lower the impact on the environment by burning fossil fuels.
At the time of printing the below image there was only a coupe of hours worth of data. So we’ll be back with a further update in the weeks to come with a much bigger dataset and some more analysis on the reduction and cost saved by not using oil.
If you would like to know more about our integration with Solis Cloud API and SmartThings API then please get in touch with us.
