FoxESS Community - Owners & Installers Forum

Hey

Just got HA setup.

I obviously have a Fox ESS battery and inverter along with an Octopus mini.

Are there any apps or easy ways to get data on my solar production and energy usage?

Also how do you setup Solcast for forecasts?

welcome to the rabbit hole

The Octopus integration by Bottlecap Dave is excellent and will provide a mine of information about your utilities, not least current tariff and events that trigger when things occur like saver sessions, switching tariff etc.. - it can take some time to master everything it can do but if you install that for starters you will be able to see a lot of data.

Solcast(.com.au) is an Australian solar tracking tool and it will allow you to create a hobby account that can have 10 observations a day, create an account there and then install this ha integration to manage it for you https://github.com/BJReplay/ha-solcast-solar that will provide up to 7 days solar forecasts and today and tomorrow which are normally pretty accurate.

Have you installed a modbus connection to the inverter ?, if you haven't yet it is the best option - more details here https://github.com/nathanmarlor/foxess_ ... ring-Guide, another alternative to get you up and running quickly is to interface the Fox cloud using their OpenAPI, this integration will do that for you https://github.com/macxq/foxess-ha and once setup will gather your 5 minute data samples and statistics very much as you can see in the app, you can then add things to the energy dashboard and it will track grid, battery, solar etc..

Will has done a really good video on how you set up the Fox modbus or cloud integrations, you can see that here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE_6HtzcyXg

Hey

Thank you for the reply!

I will look at the Octopus Intergration. Thanks

I have Solcast setup, it was saying we should have generated over 2kw of solar, but I am on 0.6kwh... Says today we will prodice 13.94kwh, we will see.

Is there a quicker (and nicer) way to view the Solcast data, it is a pain having to go settings>Device and services>find Solcast. It has also put the order as:

Forecast day 3
Forecast day 4
Forecast day 5
Forecast day 6
Forecast day 7
Forecast next hour
Forecast remaining
Forecast today
Forecast tomorrow

I want that re-ordered but cannot see how.

I do not have a Modbus installed, whilst it would be a dream, it is not practical to run ethernet that distance.

The solcast integration isn't perfect unless you have a clear unobstructed line to the sun, last few days it's been getting cloud cover wrong for me - there is on the latest version an automatic dampening setting, I haven't used it yet myself but it's supposed to look at the past 14 days and apply a factor to your solar to automatically correct it for low elevation etc...

If you have Fox cloud set up, you can add your PV to the energy dashboard and when you add it (or edit it) you can select forecast production and select solcast - that will then give you a visual representation of your solar forecast vs your actual generation for the time of day.

You can add the solcast sensors to your dashboard in devices and services, underneath the list of sensors it will say 'Add to Dashboard' - click that, tell it which dashboard you want to add it to and then you will see it there.

To change it, you just need to edit the dashboard 'card', you do that by clicking the 'edit' pen icon in top right corner, select the card you want to edit and you can delete, or change the position of entities in the card.

So i have found my Invertor SN and the Fox Cloud API, but it requires a device ID, where can I find it?


Also, tried to create a new dashboard, but when i added Solcast it says:

Solcast PV Forecast
Only one Solcast instance allowed

oxfordmark wrote: ↑Thu Oct 09, 2025 11:18 am So i have found my Invertor SN and the Fox Cloud API, but it requires a device ID, where can I find it?

the deviceID was only used for really old installs before the OpenAPI was developed so now just use your inverter SN for both the ID and SN
i.e. it would look like this

Hey

Done that, when i try to add the HA Fox ESS intergration it says:
This integration cannot be added from the UI
You can add this integration by including it in your 'configuration.yaml'. See the documentation for more information.

I have deffo added this:

10
11 scene: !include scenes.yaml
12
13 sensor:
14 - platform: foxess
15 deviceID: 609H5020530000
16 deviceSN: 609H5020530000
17 apiKey: ec7f8f27-0000-0000-0000-d7a8448f0000


Have 0'd out some of the numbers

It's not obvious whether you've got the spacing in, but spacing is critical - so the - platform should be 2 spaces in from the sensor (the - would be under the 'n' of sensor:) and then the rest should be 2 spaces in so they line up under the 'p' of platform.

It's correct in that you can't add it from the UI, only from the configuration.yaml

You must restart HA once you have added those lines and if you go to Devices and Services after the restart it should be showing an HA & Foxcloud integration with a number of entities you can then add to your dashboards.

Dave Foster wrote: ↑Thu Oct 09, 2025 12:05 pm It's not obvious whether you've got the spacing in, but spacing is critical - so the - platform should be 2 spaces in from the sensor (the - would be under the 'n' of sensor:) and then the rest should be 2 spaces in so they line up under the 'p' of platform.

It's correct in that you can't add it from the UI, only from the configuration.yaml

You must restart HA once you have added those lines and if you go to Devices and Services after the restart it should be showing an HA & Foxcloud integration with a number of entities you can then add to your dashboards.

Can you DM me and i can send a screenshot.

It is working!!!

How do you get decent data from this? Like historical graphs etc?

Also what sensors are good to display.

Great, the best sensor to add to your energy dashboard iare PVEnergyTotal - that is the total PV production for today, if you add that as a solar generation source and use the Solcast as it's forecast when you set it up - you'll see what you generated vs forecast in the Energy dashboard.
Also add grid consumption as your grid consumption, feedin as Return to grid, in the 'battery energy in' use bat charge, and energy out use bat discharge.

The best sensors to watch are these as they are totals for each day
battery discharge, battery charge (charge/discharge for today), feedin, grid consumption, load, PVEnergyTotal, Residual Energy (your battery left kWh), Bat Soc

If you click on the one called Inverter, and then drop the 'attributes' at the bottom it'll list all your firmware versions and for your batteries

PVx Power, load power, grid consumption power, are good to watch as a gauge for how much power is coming in 'now'

Energy Generated is not so useful if you have a hybrid as it is the same as total yield i.e. all the work the inverter has done either via solar or battery.