I have a Solis hydrid inverter. My neighbour has a Solax hybrid inverter.
We have been collaboration on writing node-red interfaces for both, with a lot of help and hints from the forum.
In the case of the Solax, we can hit the inverter with modbus requests at a rate of up to one per second. The Solax cloud app still appears to work normally as well. The only effect I can see is the occasional burst of time-outs every few minutes.
But in the case of the Solis, as soon as I launch the node-red flow, the cloud app stops working. Even if I only hit the inverter with a request every few minutes, the cloud app will not respond until I stop the flow.
Does anyone have any hints as to how I can get round this? I really like the cloud app for collecting historical data and of course for the remote control.
I am wondering if the Solis cloud app also uses Modbus TCP and the Solax uses something different.
What would be interesting to try, if only I knew how to do it, would be to have node red routinely issue a modbus request and then drop the connection for a few minutes. It seems to me that once the modbus flex getter gets the first data it stays connected waiting for subsequent injects. But I am only guessing; it is all too clever for me.
Unfortunately, I haven't used Modbus and so I am not sure of what protocols are used for communication, but there are those on the Forum who have more knowledge than me regarding these protocols.
I guess the question is that now you have a partially working flow, how are you communicating with the inverter? Posting a flow might help.
All of these inverters (Solis, Ginlong, Solax, Sofar and many others) use WIFI dongles made by a company called Hiflying, most of them then load a generic firmware onto the dongles that allows them to push data to the Solarman cloud (so you will see many people calling them SolarMan dongles)
Depending on the firmware and dongle revision you get various abilities that some support and others dont
You have not said where you are (location wise) - but the majority of the dongles that Solis sell in Australia do not support any form of modbus query
If you open a webpage to the IP address of the inverter you will see a login page once logged in you will be able to see the firmware version.
There are a number of projects to allow you to pull data from the Solis cloud (the data is returned in JSON format) rather than directly from the inverter itself (the problem with the Solarman dongles on the Solis inverters is that they only send data to the cloud every 6 minutes (and the dongle does the averaging)
Essentially the WIFI dongle sends Modbus commands to the inverter and the inverter returns the info requested - packages it up in a packet format known as Solarman V5 and sends it to the cloud.
Your problem/issue is that you are tryng to act as a modbus master on the network and request data from the wifi dongle which probablly does not support it.
The best solution to the problem is described in this project and is the way i would recommend you do it - it enables you to maintain connection to the Solis Cloud platform and also to monitor locally
THe project below is a slightly different approach and also works well
