Small Solar Plant with Growatt Nexa 2000

Requirements 

There are many drivers for using solar power at home. Key requirements for me were

• Storage with off grid functionality
• Deliver max. 800W on grid (due to german regulation) 
• Solar input up to 2000W
• Battery with >1kWh

Decision 

My decision was to buy a Growatt Nexa 2000: 

Installation (non IT parts) 

Physical installation (wiring, etc.) was easy. Just connect :) 

Installation (IT part) 

Connecting the device to the network was very well explained in the manual and the app confirmed the connection. But:

• Device is shown as offline in the app
• In you Wifi you can not find anything like "Nexa" or "Growatt"

What can you do? I tried to delete the device in the app and repeated to onboarding. Best thing you can do is:

WAIT 

Because the device was shown in my network with its serial number 0XXXXXXXXXXXX072 and an IP used (and i could ping it).

After 30 minutes the app started to show the device as "online". But changing the configuration did not work. 

After another wait (may be another 10 minutes) adjusting the operation mode could be change (load first <-> battery first).

Now (after >2h) i was able to start the firmware update (the app signaled from the beginning, that an update has to be installed).

But that stalled by 83% - device went offline (i did a ping all the time). Came back, went offline again, came back, .... Then: close the app, enter app again and firmware version is from 9.05.05.04 to 10.09.07.07 and ping is working faster than before. With stalling at 83% i thought, i lost the device completely but it went well and works better than before...
 

I am not sure, if i just hit an maintenance on Growatts side or the device onbaordings are queued and until you can fully operate, some time has to pass.

Integration

The app is quite nice, but for all other things i have my grafana dashboard. So next is to see, how to extract data from the Nexa.  

I will tell about my attempts in the next weeks :)