blog.peterge.de

I was searching for a way to show the forecast for our solar system on the home screen of my iPhone.

Before I started looking closer into this topic, I was using the sun hour prediction of my weather app: WarnWetter
But I wanted to get a nice widget on iOS, to place it onto the home screen.

So I started to look for apps that do this, and I found Solar PV Prognose & Warnungen, which worked quite well because of its detailed configurator for the PV modules. IMHO, the app has two downsides:

1. The widget doesn't display very much useful information (the yellow space could be used to show the forecast for another day?):

2. The app is filled with ads or cost a yearly fee (not a big problem, but I was pretty sure this is solvable by me without paying...)

And then I found out about forecast.solar, which is powered by PVGIS (the Photovoltaic Geographical Information System run by the European Union) and various weather services.
And of course there is a Home Assistant Integration for Forecast.Solar.

  homeassistant:
    container_name: homeassistant
    image: "ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:stable"
    volumes:
      - /srv/docker//homeassistant/config/:/config
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
      - /run/dbus:/run/dbus:ro
    privileged: true
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      bookstack:
        ipv4_address: 172.20.0.150
    ports:
      - 8123:8123

I set up an instance of Home Assistant on my VPS, using Docker, to not have to deal with VPN (my local instance is not publicly accessible), installed the integration and set it up using 3 different services, representing the PV strings (Harperscheid Süd represents 2 strings on the same roof):

Each service has different azimuth and total peak values. Next, I combined the 3 entities of each service using helpers (Settings > Devices & services > Helpers):

Each looks like this:

At the end I receive these 3 sensors:

Then I set up another server in the iOS app (Settings > Companion-App > Add server) and finally I was able to select the sensors in the Home Assistant sensor widget, which updates without being connected to my VPN:

Show the PV forecast in Home Assistant