Back in May, I wrote about building my home energy dashboard using Node-RED, InfluxDB and Grafana. That project has been running happily ever since, collecting data from my Solis solar inverter and presenting it in a format that's considerably more useful to me than the manufacturer's own monitoring application.
The system has an 8.1kWp solar array, battery storage and a Solis hybrid inverter. The monitoring infrastructure runs on a small Intel NUC under Unraid, alongside my Home Assistant installation and various other home automation services.
Node-RED polls the inverter over Modbus TCP, processes the readings and writes them into InfluxDB. Grafana then provides the dashboards, covering solar generation, household consumption, battery activity, grid import and export, and the associated electricity costs and savings.
It has all worked very well, but there was one obvious limitation. All the electricity measurements were coming from the Solis equipment. I wanted an independent source of grid data, preferably directly from the electricity meter itself.
