Welcome to LWN.net The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber. Thousands of subscribers depend on LWN for the best news from the Linux and free software communities. If you enjoy this article, please consider subscribing to LWN. Thank you for visiting LWN.net! By Jonathan CorbetMay 16, 2025 The first article in this series provided an overview of Home Assistant, its community, and its capabilities. It was deliberately short on descriptions of interesting things that can be done with Home Assistant, though — the reasons why one might actually want to use this program. In this closing article, we'll look at how Home Assistant was used to solve some real problems. Solar panels Electrification is good, but it is even better in the presence of abundant electricity; thus, some years ago, an investment was made to cover my roof with solar panels. The result was indeed abundant power, about double what the home and the (non-Musky) electric vehicle actually used, which was a good thing. But the situation could have been better. The panels came with a monitoring system from a company called SunPower; it collects data on panel performance and grid usage, reporting it all to some system in the cloud somewhere. The company produced a reasonably competent app that provided information about current and past performance, including data on each individual panel. Naturally, the app was the only point of access to that data, a fact which made me a bit nervous. Depending on a "free" cloud service from some vendor often does not go well. Sure enough, in 2024, SunPower went bankrupt. The company that acquired SunPower's assets (among which are counted me and my data) goes by the name SunStrong. This company recently informed me that free access to my data was coming to an end; without a payment, the app would only provide basic instantaneous data. In other words, the data generated by the solar panels, which I own, is collected by the mon...
First seen: 2025-05-17 02:45
Last seen: 2025-05-17 11:47