I would like to share my experiences here with car charging at home.
The setup:
- Wallbox: OpenWB Series2 Duo
- Cars: Skoda Citigo e iV BEV and BMW 330e PHEV
- PV: SolarEdge SE-7K-RW0TEBNN4 Wechselrichter, SolarLog 50, SolarLog Pro380 MOD
- Network: UniFi by Ubiquiti
- Smart home: KNX, Home Assistant, ...
First Steps:
1. Wallbox network connection was stabilised with power LAN.
Ethernet was is not available in the Garage. WiFi was unreliable, although AP is only about 5 m far from the wallbox with one wall in between. Tested with U6-Lite and UAP-AC-Lite.
2. BMW was charged on Ladepunkt 1.
At the begin, it didn't work. Solution: wallbox SW updated, BMW SoC is configured for Ladepunkt 1. Not sure which one exactly solved the issue.
3. Skoda was charged on Ladepunkt 2.
It was working out of the box.
4. SolarEdge Wechselrichter was set as PV Modul.
Next Steps:
5. Trying to limit the Skoda charging to 80% of its battery.
Skoda SoC module is not available in OpenWB. Suggested solution is EVCC.
Status: in progress.
6. Set SolarLog as PV and EVU Modul.
Status: not working.
See details below.
7. Set separate Stromzähler for the car charging.
Status: not working
"Thanks" to NetzeBW who can't ship a Zweirichtungszähler that separates car charging (and heating) energy from the rest.
A little explanation for PV Modul and EVU Modul:
- PV Modul tells you how many solar energy is produced currently
- EVU Modul tells you how much energy is consumed in the house
From the difference of these numbers, the wallbox can optimise the solar power usage: it tries to charge the car when the sun is shining, and your house doesn't consume all of its energy. It is more complex, I know, but I like simplicity
In this post I would like to focus a bit more on SolarLog. I hope, it will help others not to fall into the trap of SolarLog.
This company has an overcomplicated product line, with very poor documentation and very poor support.
SolarLog 50
It collects the data of
- the overall energy consumption and
- the solar energy production for one day
Sending them periodically to its backend called Web Enerest. You also have to subscribe to one of the WEB Enerest packages to see your data in their webpage. In my case, the package is called M.
SolarLog Pro380 MOD
It gets the data from SolarLog 50 and shows it on a tiny screen.
SolarLog Base 15
It costs about the same as SolarLog 50 and SolarLog Pro380 MOD together. It also provides the same functionality with one big difference.: it comes with a proper JSON API. There are a lot of integrations based on this API: openHAB, Home Assistant and of course OpenWB.
Unfortunately, I don't have a SolarLog Base. Knowing, that SolarLog50 has the necessary data, I tried to get my own data from it:
Plan A
1. Opened the local SolarLog web interface and sniffed its network traffic with Chrome Developer Tools. It uses the same getjp endpoint, as used in its open JSON interface. Only the messages are not part of the public API.
2. Enabled Local Monitoring on the local SolarLog web interface. It is hidden in Configuration / Internet / Portal, but you can make it visible via Chrome Developer Tools.
3. With the help of Postman and curl, I tried both the documented messages and the sniffed undocumented getjp messages. Some of them worked even without authentication. Some of them worked only with token based authentication. Unfortunately, the ones needed for the wallbox always returned ACCESS DENIED.
Plan B
1. With the help of Wireshark SSH remote capture and UniFi SSH, I started to sniff the messages between SolarLog 50 and its backend. Local web interface was closed to reduce the noise.
2. The gzipped data in HTTP POST messages looks like this:
PutMin
04.12.21 22:30:00|578;0;35220;1;0;11373030;311;192;73;228;226;228;-219;-197;-165;2011;1318;889;50.030;0.573;578;11373030;0;11373004|0;0;4605;0;0;392;1;0;0|0;48;457802;405;12.250;11.000;13.000;84.000;210406.000;122880.000;74.000;32576.000;26624.000;95.000;41606.000;41596.000;99.000;125020.000;102400.000;54.000;23604.000;23604.000;1169;23.917;32|70;70;70;0;62;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;32;1.000|0;0.000;0;0;0.000;0;0;0.000;0;0;0.000;0;0;0.000;0;0;0.000;0;0;0.000;0;0;0.000;0;0;0.000;0;0;0.000;0|0;1;1502;1609;5000;5000;833;845;5000;5003;0;0;15002;15109
04.12.21 22:35:00|292;0;35250;1;0;11373060;67;155;68;228;226;228;-201;-194;-164;966;1157;873;50.000;0.461;292;11373060;0;11373046|0;0;4605;0;0;393;1;0;0|0;48;457802;405;12.450;12.000;14.000;83.800;210210.000;122880.000;74.000;32576.000;26624.000;95.000;41618.000;41600.000;99.000;125020.000;102400.000;54.000;23604.000;23604.000;1174;23.922;32|70;70;70;0;59;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;32;1.000|0;0.000;0;0;0.000;0;0;0.000;0;0;0.000;0;0;0.000;0;0;0.000;0;0;0.000;0;0;0.000;0;0;0.000;0;0;0.000;0|0;5;1505;1630;5000;5005;835;883;5000;5001;0;0;15012;15139
PutLCD
{"0":[[1,0],[1,0],[0,0],[0,0],[0,0],[0,0],[1,0],[11,0],[0,0],[0,0],[0,0],[2,99],[0,0],[0,0],[0,0],[0,0]]}
frakn received similar data with a simple TCP dump and his/her go script:
https://www.photovoltaikforum.com/threa ... /?pageNo=3
At this point, I gave up, but there are still some lessons learned:
1. SolarLog forbids me to access my own data, which I find rude. For this reason, I have put SolarLog to my black list.
2. If somebody can reverse engineer the message above, a simple proxy could write the data to MQTT, which would be easy to consume by both Home Assistant and OpenWB. Questions are still
a. if it is enough for a wallbox to have these data updated in every 10 mins
b. if there is a way to force SolarLog to send these data more frequently (and let the proxy to reduce the backend communication to every 10 or 30 mins)
3. If somebody still want to make business with SolarLog, do not buy SolarLog 50 or SolarLog Pro380. Only SolarLog Base. Mind however the following SolarLog support comment:
"Unfortunately, the OpenWB wallbox is not compatible with any of our Solar-Log™ devices, hence upgrading your PV plant with a Solar-Log™ Base 15 wouldn't make any sense."
I hope, my experiences can help others in the future.