Sun Powered

In an effort to be more environmentally friendly I have gone thought the long process of having solar panels installed on my room. The process took over 3 months from initial quote to finally producing power. My system is comprised of 18  385W panels and a 6KW Solar Edge Inverter. These panels should be enough to offset my entire usage if I stop mining crypto and work out some energy saving automations to ensure I don't waste any watts.

Additionally my grid connection had to be upgraded to 200 KW service and in a effort to avoid future maintenance complications my roof was replaced with a standing seem metal roof ahead of the panel installations. This added power availability should allow me to hook up a future proof EV charger so that I can  make better use of my plugin hybrid by recharging during the day when needed rather than relying on a level 1 charger I currently use. 

This ties into the gimmick of smart home things based on the fact that the inverter reports data to the cloud. Home Assistants energy dashboard consumes this data to allow me to track total production and real time current. I was very disappointed to learn that my inverter was not also reporting net production like the API documentation indicated might be available. That added data can be accessed if I install some add on accessory to monitor the back feed to the grid or I can add on a full monitoring solution to track my individual circuits as well as the grid connection. Once I have that full data available I should be able to control my car charging to insure it really is powered by the sun.

Planning for failure

 This week the new Home Assistant Core 2022.4.0 was released. As with all updated I was eager to update my system after reading the release notes to make sure there was no breaking changes I care about. Additionally I took the opportunity to update the OS to 7.6 from 7.2. That is where the problems started.

Once the updates were complete I noticed an issue, Zigbee and Zwave communication was not working. At this point I realized the most recent full backup I had was from just under a week ago. Normally that wouldn't be a problem, but in the last week I had updated camera configurations, scripts, automations, and added new hardware since the last backup. 

Once I noticed this issue I tried to fix forward by touching the Zwave config that was claiming to be broken  then when that failed I restored from the partial backup automatically created when the Core version was updated. This didn't help. Then I paused and decided I should probably create a back up in the bad state since at least it had my script/automation/device changes. If I failed in restoring at least I could get back to the current status.

I then restored to the last full backup hoping that at least I could regain control of my lights. The restore process worked, but the issue persisted. This left me very confused for a few minutes until I realized that the OS level hadn't changed. Apparently Home Assistant does not consider OS level part of a "full" backup. Luckily they do allow downgrading OS via a simple terminal command, so I was able to downgrade the OS to 7.2 and reboot. At this point my Zigbee/Zwave integrations were working again. 

The next step was to go through the restore process once more, but this time using the backup I had just created after recognizing there was a problem. Luckily Home Assistant allows you to complete a partial restore from a full backup, so I was able to restore everything accept the Zwave configuration that I had attempted to correct manually. 

I know people say not to plan for failure, but in tech you really do need to have appropriate plans in place or you might end up not being able to turn your light off/on. This experience has inspired me to be more patient when it comes to applying updates and to ensure that a backup is done anytime a significant change is done.  

Thanks to this nifty add-on (https://community.home-assistant.io/t/add-on-home-assistant-google-drive-backup/107928) I have automated backups that are stored in my google cloud account on a regular cadence. But that doesn't protect me from making foolish mistakes like I did in this post. If anything, I previously had more caution around changes/updates when I knew the only backups available were ones I manually created.