FoxESS Community - Owners & Installers Forum

Hi everyone,

I recently had my solar system + battery installed. I am in a bit of a unique situation as the company I got my system from will actually pay my electricity bills for the next 7 years. In a nutshell, they take control of the system and are responsible for grid feed in/out, battery, solar controlling etc. Because of this, they are using the RS485 connection to monitor/control the entire system. They have told me that whilst they are paying the bill, I will not be allowed to patch into the RS485 connection. They did suggest using the Fox ESS cloud to use with Home Assistant, but I am not a fan of the data resolution being only in 5 - 10 minute intervals.

My question is, is there any other way I can pull the data from the inverter without using the RS485 connection or the Fox ESS cloud? Looking at the wiki for the modbus addon for Home Assistant, it is telling me that Fox shut off the LAN port on their system. I am just wondering if this is still the case, or if this has been updated recently?

I have not yet got access to the Fox Cloud as I am still waiting to get everything finalised.

EDIT: I should probably include specs.

Panels - 14 x Tiger Neo 440W Panels ( 6.16kW )
Inverter - Fox ESS 5kW AIO-H1-5.0
Battery - 4 x Fox ESS HV2600 ( 10.24 kWh )

Any help is appreciated.

Cheers!

Hi, the LAN port has been shut down on latest firmware but even when it worked, it would disable the RS485 comms (only one or the other).

It's a shame they won't let you share the RS485 solution they installed as some adapters will allow this but I can imagine given your funding model why they will be keen to keep it unique to them for reliability.

Which unfortunately brings you back to the cloud access, it is only 5 minute resolution but surprisingly accurate - the only fly in the works is that the OpenAPI is suffering performance problems at the moment, if you have used the Energy Stats app you will know already. Fox know about the problem and we are waiting for them to invest the resources they need to correct it but as yet there is no timescale and so for now the HA cloud integration https://github.com/macxq/foxess-ha is working but suffering numerous timeouts during the day.

Hi Dave,

Thank you very much for your response. Yeah, it is a shame they won't give me access, but understandable. I have set up a Shelly EM with two metering clamps. I have one set up on the grid feed-in to the switchboard. The other one is set up on the solar breaker. This is giving me somewhat decent readings but it is also limiting.
It is currently 11:15pm and the sun has long since set. I can see however that I am getting 500w of power from the solar, which I would assume is actually coming from the battery. Hopefully the Fox ESS cloud will be able to fill in the blanks.

Thanks again for the information.

Cheers!