Energy Manager |


Installation Instructions

There are four sections to be followed to deploy the Energy Manager system to your Home Assistant Green or Yellow, Raspberry Pi 5, or Intel NUC.

⚠️Time to complete the installation

You should expect the installation to take you between one and two hours, depending on your skill level. As much configuration as can be done without your input has already been done, but we are limited by what Home Assistant will allow us to automate to a certain extent. These tasks must be done by yourself.

ℹ️Amber Electric Smartshift (or other control methods)

If you decide to use Energy Manager to manage your solar and batteries, the Amber Electric Smartshift app must be configured so that it cannot control your inverter. If you leave it enabled, both Energy Manager and Smartshift will battle over the controls and produce unexpected results. You can still leave Smartshift with access to your inverter so it can show its graphs and charts, but it must not have control access.

📝Installation Steps

  1. Purchase or reuse a suitable Intel NUC (everything will be deleted from it, so make sure you have no data on it you want to keep). It is also possible to purchase a Home Assistant Green or Yellow, or a Raspberry Pi, and get it working with Energy Manager. Basically, anything that can run Home Assistant OS should work with Energy Manager.
  2. Install the latest Home Assistant OS on your Intel NUC. Note that this must be the full Home Assistant Operating System which allows add-ons to be included. The Home Assistant Container does not allow add-ons, so will not work with Energy Manager.
  3. Restore an Energy Manager preconfigured backup of Home Assistant. This contains all the components to interact with the Energy Manager system. This will wipe over any data that currently exists on your Intel NUC.
  4. Perform some configuration updates that will be unique to your system in Home Assistant.

Links to each of these steps are detailed below:

  1. Purchase or reuse a suitable Home Assistant Green or Yellow, Raspberry Pi, or Intel NUC
  2. Install the latest Home Assistant OS on your device (not needed for a Home Assistant Green or Yellow device):
  3. Restore an Energy Manager preconfigured backup over your newly built Home Assistant
  4. Perform final configurations on the restored Home Assistant instance

💡Intel NUC & Raspberry Pi vs Home Assistant Green and Yellow devices

Note that generally a cheap Intel NUC from Amazon.com.au, or similar, should perform well and possibly be cheaper than purchasing an official Green or Yellow device (but potentially more difficult to initially configure). However, if you were to purchase a Green or Yellow device, you would not need to perform step 2 above. The Raspberry Pi would still need step 2 performed, but it is relatively straightforward.

ℹ️Note

Please note that the first two steps are not unique to the Energy Manager system; they are prerequisites to getting the base Home Assistant working. Step 2 is by far the most difficult step that you will have to do, but this is a requirement to get the base Home Assistant working that Energy Manager is built on. However, step 2 is not required if you are going to use a Home Assistant Green or Yellow device.