Make Growatt Battery Smart | How to Integrate with Home Assistant

Why use Home Assistant with Growatt

The standard Growatt app provides energy figures and graphs, but the video argues that these figures can be difficult to interpret as a complete picture of household energy use. Home Assistant brings solar production, battery activity, grid movement and home consumption together on one dashboard.

The live energy-flow card shows where power is coming from and where it is going. Surplus solar can be shown charging the battery or being exported to the grid, while household usage is displayed alongside those flows. The dashboard is designed to reduce the need to move through separate menus or screens.

Information included on the dashboard

The example dashboard includes battery timing information, including estimated battery hours remaining and time until the battery is recharged. It also shows the battery’s remaining energy in kilowatt-hours and its current percentage. These figures are intended to make battery behaviour easier to understand than a percentage alone.

Financial cards calculate grid import costs and estimated savings from solar and battery use. The example also includes the bill total so far, projected end-of-month costs and an energy-saving period. Lifetime statistics cover total imports, exports and solar generation.

Charts show solar production and battery activity over time. The solar chart illustrates the rise and fall of production through the day, while the battery chart shows overnight discharge and daytime charging. The video also demonstrates a tile showing battery hours remaining based on current household consumption.

Installation on a Windows computer

The tutorial starts with a Windows machine. It installs the Windows Subsystem for Linux, followed by Docker Desktop. The Docker setup uses WSL2 integration rather than Hyper-V, and Docker is configured to start when Windows is signed in so Home Assistant can continue collecting data.

The video creates Home Assistant directories for the installation, configuration and backups. It stresses that the configuration should be stored in a persistent location such as the C: drive rather than only inside Docker, because data stored inside a container could be lost when Docker restarts. The installation then runs Home Assistant as a Docker container and opens its local web interface.

Adding Growatt and creating sensors

After creating a local Home Assistant account, the tutorial installs HACS, the community store for additional Home Assistant capabilities. It then installs the Power Flow Card Plus, which provides the animated solar, battery, grid and home energy-flow display.

The Growatt integration is added through Home Assistant’s Devices and Services area. In the example, the API option is selected for a compatible MIN inverter model. The process requires logging into the Australian Growatt website, checking the device type, locating the device serial number and copying an API token. The video notes that the token should be copied without spaces.

Several template sensors, known as helpers, are then created. These combine separate Growatt readings into totals for solar power, battery charging and discharging, battery energy remaining and estimated battery hours remaining. The relevant device ID must be inserted into the templates, and the tutorial specifies units such as watts, kilowatt-hours and hours for the different sensors.

Building the first dashboard

The Power Flow Card Plus is configured with grid import and export, total solar power, battery state of charge, battery charging and discharging power, and household load. Once the readings match the Growatt app, the dashboard can be arranged and resized for desktop or mobile viewing.

Additional sections and tiles can be added for battery information, gauges, statistics and graphs. The video presents the dashboard as a starting point, with further customisation possible using Home Assistant cards and the shared configuration examples mentioned in the tutorial.