[APP][Pro] Solar Forecasts (SolCast + Forecast.Solar)

Hi
Great app!
The forecast seems to be a bit lower than my actuals. Is upload of actuals still supported in the solcast app? Will this also show on the Solcast website, or is the tuning only done in the Homey app?

Where can I see the raw forecast and the tuned forecast?

Upload still works, but I think Solcast doesn’t use it anymore.

You can see the raw data on the Solcast site.

The homey app doesn’t manipulate the data, it is the raw data.

Hi, I am using the App and 10 calls a day are plenty for me, but it looks like calls to the API are being made in the background. I use the Fetch Solcast Update Flowcard every hour and only start after 11am, but the last forecast I get is at 3pm. After that all values are the same as I exceed the number of allowed calls.
Is this possible? Can I prevent it?

Did you disable automatc polling?
The app uses 1 api call at midnight and 1 at sunrise

No,

I will go and look for it. But will that only reduce the number of calls by 2?

Edit - OK, that is done. It did say there that I had made 24 API calls today. So hopefully switching off auto polling should fix my problem.
Can you confirm?

So in reality I only get 8 per day? New users get a maximum of 10 I believe?

That should work

You get 10 api calls.
But the app uses 2 api calls for the daily forecast

Ok, got it. So if I use the daily forecast it doesn’t count against my API calls?
And to access that data I use the Upload PV Production card? And when you do that what do you put in the number field?

If I remember the statements from the provider, the production upload is ignored for free accounts. They do not adjust/finetune your settings anymore.
Only thing you can do is to check the forecast and if it’s too high/low, then adjust your PV settings in your account until you get valid forecasts.
I have a north and a south side. This way I created two PV entries to geg valid data for both (depending on time/sun). Then I just sum ip both forecasts into a virtual device to get the daily forcast for the whole PV.
This way, the upload/finetuning is not needed for approximately realistic values.

Is the API currently providing data for “forecast today”?
This value was updated last time at 31.02.2024.
Other values like “forecast tomorrow” was updated the last days.

Thanks for this idea @RonnyW I’ll adapt that. Interesting that you have North/South. Doesn’t the sun traverse east to west over there? :smile:

Yes, same here. Actually I would like to know what triggers the forecast (such as Remaining Today) to be updated. I haven’t run fetch forecast update yet today so maybe it is what triggers it.

Also @RonnyW I’d like to know if you have come up with some nice logic to update the WMaxLmtPct value to write to the Fronius registers to control the output based on this data.
Although you probably don’t have -ve Feed In Tarrifs over there like I do. Because of these tarrifs I need to monitor solar production when my battery nears 100% as once it reaches that figure (which can happen pretty early in the day in summer, even with 27kW of battery), I need to curtail the inverter so I’m not paying to export power. If you were interested in how this setup works have a look at amberelectric.com.au

No the daily forecast counts for the api calls

So 8 available

If you hav polling on, it should poll every hour.
Forecast today updates at midnight.

Your homey location and timezone must be correct

Hi, I already reduced the API calls to 8 to prevent a limit. But still the forecast today is not updated (updated 6 days ago). All other capabilities got updated some hours ago.

I am travelling now so I cannot make updates now.

You can send me a diagnostics report, but in the past the problem was that when the app tries to get the daily forecast at midnight, but the api calls are still used from the previous day.

I can change this hour to let’s say 3am to make sure the new api calls are available

Thanks, no hurries… I’ll reduce the amount of API calls in device settings.
One idea…I have 2 devices and both are set to 10 polls. But both are using the same API key, just for 2 sites.
So set 3 calls for a device should work?
2x2 standard calls and 2x3 per device to stay below 10?

Have a nice trip :grinning:

I tried to make a small tweak, the app should now fetch the daily forecast between 02 and 04 Local Time.

Please try the test app to test

1 Like

I updated the App so I will see what happens early tomorrow morning. I didn’t get a forecast last night as I did the night before.
At the moment I’m getting no forecast at all.

Update - my fault - I removed code that said only run during the day and exceeded my calls.