I don’t know about the history of selfhosted, I use a vps at hetzner which serves as playground and I use a mini desktop (hp elitedesk) as my home automation lab.
This community is an inspiration on spotting new techniques and software to discover!
May I comments you both for the openness, politeness and helpfulness displayed here?
Thanks!
I also found the response informative, and thanks for making lemmy/fediverse happen!
For reference: smart meters like Kamstrup are in use all over the EU. Example of a p1 dongle is the “smart meter gateway” which can be read from home assistant via the DSMR integration or directly from mqtt.
This would give you the counters for exactly how much you have pulled from and pushed into the grid.
Can confirm this will integrate nicely into the energy dashboard.
And biggest tip: when you have configured everything, it will take up to 2 hours before any data is visible from the energy dashboard. This screwed me over quite a bit, needless to say :-)
Look up your inverter brand and pray there is an integration for it. Also: try to make your electrical meter smart to be able to tell the difference between pulling from grid and delivering to grid. If you already have a smart meter, see if it exposes some interface (like P1 with the DSMR protocol for example) to easily integrate the meter into home assistant.
I have done all this with a goodwe inverter and a kamstrup meter P1 port using a DSMR dongle.
If you need any pointers, dm me.
Have been customer with hetzner for more than 10 years and they are awesome. First physical server (HDD swaps in 10 minutes!) Now on their cloud environment. It just runs and is cost effective!
You can even use terraform to describe your resources and have them created automatically, or use the API from any programming language.