How We Automate Our Off-Grid Solar to Use Every Drop of Power

Welcome back to the finca!

It's been far too hot to be doing much building work, so today we're in the office talking about something that's become a really important part of our 100% off-grid setup: automatically managing our solar power.

Once our batteries are full, there's still plenty of solar energy available. Rather than letting that excess power go to waste—or constantly monitoring the system ourselves—we've been using Home Assistant and Solar Assistant to automate what happens to that energy.

In this video I'll show you some of the ways we've set up our system, including automatically controlling:

• Air conditioning when there is enough solar power available
• Electric heaters during the winter
• Hot water heating
• Our backup generator
• Battery charge and discharge levels
• Low-battery protection
• Generator failure alerts
• Automatic switching of loads depending on available solar power

We can set conditions so that appliances come on when our batteries reach a certain level and solar production is high enough, then automatically switch them off again if conditions change.

We've also set up our generator to start automatically when the batteries fall below a certain level and stop again once they've recovered. If something goes wrong and the generator doesn't start, the system can alert us on our phones.

This has made managing our off-grid solar system much easier and means we can make far better use of the electricity our solar panels produce without having to constantly monitor everything ourselves.

We're not sponsored by or affiliated with Home Assistant or Solar Assistant—we're simply sharing what we've found useful on our own off-grid system.

Next week, hopefully, we'll be back to the building and restoration work once the temperatures finally start to drop!

Thanks for watching and for supporting the channel.

#OffGrid #SolarPower #OffGridSolar #HomeAssistant #SolarAssistant #SolarEnergy #OffGridLiving #RenewableEnergy #DIY #SolarAutomation

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