ImmerSun Solar Power Diverter Monitoring

With the solar panels operational I wanted to try to get the monitoring of the electricity consumption and solar power generation working properly. The plan was always to use the monitoring built in to the ImmerSun solar power diverter to do that, but that plan was derailed by 4eco, the manufacturers of the ImmerSun devices, going out of business in July 2016 – the month after I’d bought my ImmerSun units.

The good news is that the ImmerSun technology was purchased by another company (SISEM Ltd) and everything – including the monitoring via their Cloud-based server – is currently working OK. I’m not impressed by their communication since they failed to respond to several attempts to contact them by phone and email but via other resources on the Internet I worked out how to reconfigure the unit to contact the new server.

I’ve written a separate Page which goes into more detail of what I had to do and also covers how to grab data via a script. The mobile app (partial screen-shot below) is quite pretty and has some pleasing animations but the data is most useful when it can be integrated into a wider monitoring system and displayed alongside other data on a single dashboard.

Overview Section of myImmerSUN iOS App screen

CC BY-SA 4.0 ImmerSun Solar Power Diverter Monitoring by Marsh Flatts Farm Self Build Diary is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

2 thoughts on “ImmerSun Solar Power Diverter Monitoring

  1. Hi there. I’ve read with interest your parts 1 & 2 on your investigation to maintain access to your Immersun data due to intermittent server availability. You’re not alone in your frustration! A fortnight ago access to many (most / all?) individual’s Immersun data stopped without any response to tickets, Facebook messages etc. This prompted me to return to your posts to see how you have responded to this lengthy (permanent?) outage and whether you now have some sort of step by step solution that others, who do not have the remarkable networking skills that you have, could follow to set up their own local data capture and display service. I have other monitoring platforms in place however none provide the detail that Immersun did. I’ve also decided to order a Powerwall for the autumn as I believe the possibility of energy rationing / power cuts in the winter is rising. Tesla have a very comprehensive monitoring platform however I would like to retain my Immersun data, locally if possible. Thanks for the interesting article.

    • Hi Martin,

      I share your frustration that the immerSUN back-end server goes away more often and for longer than we’d like it to.

      I don’t have a complete answer and since my approach is effectively to “snoop” on the comms between the immerSUN unit and the server, when the server goes away I lose my monitoring too. (I think I do survive some of the outages since sometimes the UDP server that talks to the immerSUN devices remains operational when the HTTP server that talks to the Apps and hosts the web page is offline.)

      An alternative approach would be to completely *replace* the immerSUN server with some code running on the local network. If such a locally-running server was available, it could be configured by changing the “Cloud IP” setting on the immerSUN unit and would not need the weird firewall set-up to re-route the comms. However, it would require the work to implement such a server, decoding how to originate the response messages such that the immerSUN unit thinks it’s talking to the real server, and not an imposter.

      David

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