(Excuse my English)
Maybe someone will be interested. My path to Node-Red as a home monitoring platform.
The year before last, I decided to enter the energy transition and purchase a PV system and a heat pump. Curiously, I came to this through the consideration of the next car purchase. E-car or not, wallbox, etc. and in no time at all I was in the energy transition.
So I was looking for a "monitoring platform" and came across ioBrocker. http://iobroker.net.
I found https://shop.haus-automatisierung.com/, took a course in no time at all and, after some difficulties, got a Raspberry PI 4. These were outweighed by gold at the time (mid-2022). I didn't have a PV and heat pump yet, but some Tasmota adapter plugs should be able to handle 16A. One to the washing machine, one to the fridge, one to the TV.
Since I would also like to monitor the COP later, I have already installed two heat meters in the return line for the ground floor and the upper floor. I receive their values with a nanoCUL. (That didn't work right away, so that I could check the function, I had to install FHEM in the meantime, so it worked very easily.) Later I made do with wmbusmeters (GitHub - wmbusmeters/wmbusmeters: Read the wired or wireless mbus protocol to acquire utility meter readings.) and MQTT.
However, the matter was not round. I didn't like the dashboard. Please keep in mind that although I am tech-savvy, I have had little to do with this topic so far, so I am still an amateur.
Next step: Home Assistant. I liked HA very much. Many, many possibilities. The meter for the gas heating was queried with a Reed Relay and ESPhome and these values were linked to the heat meters and used, among other things, to determine the heat pump.
In the meantime, the PV was on the roof and the heat pump in the garden.
HA was easy to handle in principle, but it still limited me somehow and there were more and more data points that somehow led their own lives. Another intermediate version on Docker. Ultimately, some apps (Docker containers) would need to be maintained. Because there were also Grafana, infludDB, Mosquitto-Mqtt.
I have a Raspberry and an Odroid M1. One "productive", one "test".
So I looked at Node-Red. It seemed clearer to me. First with Grafana and InfluxDB.
A traffic light helps my wife start the washing machine or dishwasher. That doesn't mean I don't operate these devices.
But after some time I asked myself: "What should I do with all the data?" and slimmed down the system. Now only Node-Red with the Node-Red dashboard, I will go deeper into this system. I no longer store in an InfluxDB, but only daily values in a CSV file, simple backup. Advantages: Less maintenance, better performance of the dashboard
Not the last version.
IObrocker, HA, Node-Red are fantastic programs. None should be done down here.
Todo: Integration of the heating element in the hot water tank, PV and heat pump.
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