Home assistant sensors for Ferroamp EnergyHub

Ferroamp MQTT support sends updates to these topics:

• extapi/data/ehub (interval 1s)
• extapi/data/eso (interval 5s)
• extapi/data/sso (interval 5s)
• extapi/data/esm (interval 60s)

Prerequisites

• Home assistant 2024.4.x
• Enable Ferroamp MQTT by contacting Ferroamp Support to get the username and password for your Energy MQTT broker.
• Add Home assistant MQTT integration and set the broker to your Ferroamp Energy IP and configure it with your username and password received from Ferroamp (or setup a bridge-connection if you already have an MQTT-server, see the Configuring Bridges-section in the Mosquitto documentation).

Install using HACS (recommended)

The repository is compatible with HACS (Home Assistant Community Store).

Install HACS and search for Ferroamp Sensors and install it directly from HACS. HACS will keep track of updates and you can easily upgrade this component to the latest version.

• https://hacs.xyz/docs/installation/manual
  • https://hacs.xyz/docs/basic/getting_started

Git installation

1. Make sure you have git installed on your machine.
2. Navigate to you home assistant configuration folder.
3. Execute the following command: git clone https://github.com/henricm/ha-ferroamp.git
4. Create a custom_components folder if it does not exist, and cd into it.
5. Create a symbolic link by executing ln -s ../ha-ferroamp/custom_components/ferroamp

Setup

1. Add the Ferroamp MQTT Sensors-integration (you might have to refresh your browser window since Home Assistant doesn't update the integration list after a reboot)
2. Set a name for the integration as well as the MQTT-prefix where updates are sent (default values are probably fine for a standard-setup but if a bridge-connection is used the MQTT-topics can be re-mapped)
3. Wait for all the devices to become present (EnergyHub, SSO's, ESOs and ESMs depending on your setup. Be patient since ESMs are only updated every 60 seconds.)

This integration will add lots of sensors for the installed hardware with the prefix <integration name>_. For the SSO and ESO sensors, they will include the id of the SSO or ESO unit, eg sensor.ferroamp_sso_123456_pv_string_power.

I'm also still figuring out what some of the sensors actually are, since the Ferroamp API documentation still seems to be incomplete in some areas.

Upgrading from a version before config flow was implemented

1. Remove the integration configuration. i.e this

   sensor:
     - platform: ferroamp
   

2. Restart Home Assistant
3. Remove all Ferroamp entities (they will be re-created once the new setup is completed)
4. Follow the regular Setup

NB: Three sensors have changed name due to typos being fixed. Those three will lose their history and any usage in lovelace/automations need to be manually updated.

Renamed sensors:

Update interval

To avoid too much data into home assistant, we only update sensors with new values every 30 second (average values are calculated where appropriate). This interval can be configured in the options of the integration.

Battery control

This integration adds services for charging, discharging and autocharge. Please see Ferroamp API documentation for more info about this functionality:

If more than one EnergyHub is configured, the target parameter needs to be set to the name of the EnergyHub to control.

ferroamp.charge

Parameter power needs to be specified in W.

power: 1000

ferroamp.discharge

Parameter power needs to be specified in W.

power: 1000

ferroamp.autocharge

No parameters - sets the battery back into autocharge.

Energy Dashboard

With the Home Assistant Core 2021.8 release an Energy Dashboard was introduced. To set it up correctly with your Ferroamp EnergyHub use the sensors as described below.

Electricity grid

Grid consumption

External Energy Consumed

Return to grid

External Energy Produced

Solar Panels

Solar production

Total Solar Energy or add one for each SSO and use SSO xxx Total Energy

Home Battery Storage

Energy going in to the battery

Battery Energy Produced

Energy coming out of the battery

Battery Energy Consumed

Utility meter

Inspired from this blog post, I discovered the utility meter sensor available in home assistant. I use it to track grid, solar and battery energy, hourly, daily, monthly by the configuration below in configuration.yml:

utility_meter:
  solar_energy_daily:
    source: sensor.ferroamp_total_solar_energy
    cycle: daily
  solar_energy_monthly:
    source: sensor.ferroamp_total_solar_energy
    cycle: monthly
  battery_energy_produced_daily:
    source: sensor.ferroamp_eso_20030049_total_energy_produced
    cycle: daily
  battery_energy_produced_monthly:
    source: sensor.ferroamp_eso_20030049_total_energy_produced
    cycle: monthly
  battery_energy_consumed_daily:
    source: sensor.ferroamp_eso_20030049_total_energy_consumed
    cycle: daily
  battery_energy_consumed_monthly:
    source: sensor.ferroamp_eso_20030049_total_energy_consumed
    cycle: monthly
  external_energy_consumed_daily:
    source: sensor.ferroamp_external_energy_consumed
    cycle: daily
  external_energy_consumed_monthly:
    source: sensor.ferroamp_external_energy_consumed
    cycle: monthly
  external_energy_produced_daily:
    source: sensor.ferroamp_external_energy_produced
    cycle: daily
  external_energy_produced_monthly:
    source: sensor.ferroamp_external_energy_produced
    cycle: monthly

Monitoring latest Ferroamp version

If you are tired of manually verifying if there is any new version available from ferroamp, then you can configure this scraper and also using the provided automation to get notifications when ferroamp releases a new version.

scrape:
  - resource: https://support.ferroamp.com/sv-SE/support/solutions/47000522529
    timeout: 10
    scan_interval: 86400 # only scan for new updates once a day
    sensor:
      - name: Ferroamp Latest Version
        select: '.file-card > .fw-no-bullet > li'
        icon: mdi:counter
        index: 0
        value_template: >
          {{ value | replace ("Programvarurelease ", "") }}

automation:
  - id: 'notify_new_ferroamp_version'
    alias: Notify New Ferroamp Version
    description: 'Notify when ferroamp release a new firmware version'
    trigger:
      - platform: state
        entity_id: sensor.ferroamp_latest_version
    condition:
      # prevent unwanted triggers
      - "{{ trigger.from_state.state not in ['unknown', 'unavailable'] }}"
      - "{{ trigger.to_state.state not in ['unknown', 'unavailable'] }}"
      - "{{ trigger.from_state.state != trigger.to_state.state}}"
    action:
      # replace service with your notification service here!
      - service: notify.my_phone
        data_template:
          title: New Ferroamp version available
          message: |
            Version {{ states('sensor.ferroamp_latest_version') }} is now available.
          data:
            push:
              thread-id: "ferroamp_notification"

Contributing

Everybody is invited and welcome to contribute to the Ferroamp Sensors integration.

The process is straight-forward.

Clone the repository

• Read How to get faster PR reviews by Kubernetes (but skip step 0 and 1)
• Fork the Ferroamp Sensors git repository.

Setup development environment

Visual Studio Code

This repository includes devcontainer configuration for Visual Studio Code with everything you need to get started. See instructions for more details.

Other IDEs

• Install python 3.11+

• Recommended: create a python virtual environment for the project.

• Install development dependencies:

    $ pip install -r requirements.dev.txt
  

• Install pre-commit GIT hooks

  $ pre-commit install
  

• Make your changes

• Commit your changes and ensure pre-commit hooks execute sucessfully.

Creating a Pull Request

• Ensure tests work.
• Commit the code following the Conventional Commits format.
• Create a Pull Request against the master branch of Ferroamp Sensors.