Building a Home Energy Dashboard with Node-RED, MQTT, InfluxDB and Grafana

I recently started building a local energy monitoring dashboard for my home solar setup. The goal was to take live data from my Solis inverter, process it in Node-RED, publish it through MQTT, store it in InfluxDB, and visualise it in Grafana.

This post outlines the first working version of that setup, and is a continuation of the initial retrieval of data from Solis into NodeRed

The Overall Architecture

The final data path looks like this:

Solis inverter
  ↓
Modbus TCP
  ↓
Node-RED
  ↓
MQTT / Mosquitto
  ↓
InfluxDB
  ↓
Grafana

The idea is to keep MQTT as the central message bus. Node-RED reads and decodes the inverter data, publishes useful values to MQTT, and also writes those values into InfluxDB for historical storage. Grafana then reads from InfluxDB to provide dashboards and charts.

Importing Solis Inverter Data to Node Red

I wanted a reliable way to pull live data from my Solis hybrid inverter into Node-RED. The goal was not just to view the same information shown in SolisCloud, but to make the data available locally for dashboards, automation, MQTT, Home Assistant / Homey, and eventually longer-term graphing in something like Grafana.

The SolisCloud app is useful, but it is not ideal for automation. It can lag by several minutes, and the values shown in the app are not always updated at the same moment. For automation, I wanted local data directly from the inverter/datalogger path.

This is what I ended up with;

Improving Windows 11 VM Performance on Unraid (Threadripper)

I’ve been running a Windows 11 VM on my Unraid server for a while now. It’s reasonably well specced. Threadripper 3960X, RTX 3090 passed through, dedicated SSD. On paper it should feel very close to bare metal.

In reality, it didn’t.

Nothing obviously broken, but general UI usage felt a bit sluggish. Windows took a little longer to open things than expected.  With the help of my ChatGPT sidekick, I decided to go through the config properly and see what could be improved. Logging it here mainly for my own reference later.