Measuring power usage and PV the right way. Please help!

Questions & Help
1

Hello,

For many years I have used Plugwise with Plugwise Circles and Stealth modules to monitor my solar panels. This has worked flawlessly since around 2010 and is running to this day because I still have no better alternative.

I have 5 PV units running (around 13KWp) via Stealth and Circles.

With plugwise I can see the output per hour for every unit, but also combined in a group.

Major advantage is that a PV inverter is not coupled to a specific measuring device. When a Circle dies, I simply put another one in and connect it via the software to the specified device. In homey I use Shelly’s to measure the inverters. One Shelly died and so did the history because it is coupled to the Shelly and not to the Inverter. Also replacing a inverter I should not need to be losing all history data.

In Plugwise this is separated which works fantastic. In plugwise I can select, hour, day, week, month and year en put a from and to date and I get all the graphs and stats that I need, plain and simple.

I just need to get rid of Plugwise, because the hardware a starting to fail after 16 years of use. More and more Circles fail to keep the relays powered (failing capacitors etc.).

Also every appliance in the house I keep track off via Plugwise. I’m planning to replace them all at once for INNR zigbee smart outlets.

What I really need is some way to create devices in Homey, that power logs are written to that device and when the hardware fails I can just assign a new device continuïng where the old device has left. I don’t seem to be able to do that. I’ve tried with virtual device, but that does not seem to work.

Also grouping devices does not do the trick.

I’m at a point that I’m giving up. It gets more complicated every time I try to fix things. Even simple things like the energy monitor, where I say the Shelly’s are my PV panels, it registers the data plain wrong. Made virtual devices to invert the values, but then things elsewhere are messed up.

Does anyone have some tutorial that actually works for me to straightforward set things up?

I would love to start 2026 measuring my power usage and PV panels via Homey, but I’m tempted to sell everything and start over completely with a different system.

Thank you very much.

2

AFAIK, it’s not possible to replace a device and keep its history, since historical data is tightly coupled to device ID’s, and those are always unique (when you add a new device to Homey, it gets a new device ID, even if it replaced an existing device).

Even so, usage logs (“Insights”) on Homey are only mildly useful, since they get averaged down aggressively (meaning that only averages are stored, the original values are gone forever). But even apps that provide the ability to save device data to long-term storage will likely use the device ID and the problem remains.

3

Ouch,

Then this Homey system seems not to be for me then. Too bad I already invested in this.

Power usage statistics, I thought that would be very basic stuff in modern domotica systems, but it seems that I was wrong. That’s very disappointing.

In Plugwise I can retrieve every single hour of 16 years of many devices connected to the system and the database backup is still under 10 megabytes, so that should not be an issue.
Plugwise only stores KWh’s used or generated, no voltages etc but I only need the KWh.

4

Homey works differently :man_shrugging:t3:

5

Have a look here if you’re looking for a way to store your data: How to log all device's measurements to TimescaleDB, and view them in Grafana - #3

6

That only solves the “historical data” issue, not the “data is tied to device ID” issue :frowning:

7

Don’t the insights get touched when the ‘dead’ device isn’t removed from Homey?
I know, it’s a bit “houtje-touwtje”, but if the particular insights are important

@Ferry_Heibrink If you removed the Shelly within the last 7 days, you can restore a backup to get the insights back.
Just don’t remove the dead Shelly from Homey.
But, as stated alr, insights aren’t very useful when you want exact historical data.

8

If you mean if the insights will keep existing, then yes, but then you have two different sets of insights for a single actual device, which seems to me like a PITA.

9

Correct.

Yes indeed it would be “far from ideal” :wink: , but if the data is thát important, it might be a temporary workaround, like, at some point you won’t be needing historical data from before 202x or 201x anylonger.

Makes me think, why isn’t a “You’ll lose all device insights” warning issued, when you want to remove a device


10

True, but since it is a database you can control, you can change the deviceID in older records to the new deviceID when you changes devices.
And it would even enable you to keep your data when moving to a different platform.

(I have no experience with this particular solution, but I can’t image you can not change older records.)

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