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goodwe-addon/goodwe_controller/DOCS.md
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TARIFF-10: configuring a price provider is what fetches prices
amain() started the background tariff refresh only when arbitrage_enabled was
on, and that option ships false. run_tariff_refresh is the only caller of
resolve_tariff(), which is the only caller of price_history.carry() - so on a
shipped install with a price provider configured nothing was ever fetched: no
plan resolved, /data/price_history.json never created, the Price history status
row reading `empty` for the life of the install, and TARIFF-09's short-horizon
warning unable to fire because there was no fetch to warn about. Measured over
a 40 h two-instance soak on one feed: 0 requests and `present: false` across all
802 samples, against a resolved 132-point plan on the instance with arbitrage
armed.

git log -S puts the refresh task, its arbitrage.enabled() guard AND the DOCS.md
sentence saying a configured provider still fetches in the same commit - OPT-04,
bdd7f18; config.yaml has carried the claim since TARIFF-02, 852fc7c. The prose
and the code disagreed from the moment both existed and nothing compared them.
config.yaml and both translations additionally carried a claim that had rotted
the other way - "nothing consumes the price series yet", untrue since OPT-04
shipped the consumer. All four surfaces now say what the add-on does, and a
check pairs DOCS against the DRIVEN behaviour so they cannot drift again.

The gate is tariff_refresh_wanted() = provider_configured(opts) or
arbitrage.enabled(opts), and the `or` is a STRICT WIDENING: every configuration
that started the task before still starts it. The second term is not there for
symmetry. price_provider: off + a static_profile + arbitrage_enabled: true is a
configuration validate.py explicitly ACCEPTS and it trades - measured, at
cycle_cost_threshold_eur 0.05 on a 0.20/0.284 day/night profile,
ARBITRAGE_CHARGE -5000 W. Gating on the provider alone would leave that site's
tariff_plan at None forever and answer "no tariff plan has been resolved yet" on
every cycle, silently disarming a strategy the UI says is running.

Nothing acquires a periodic HTTPS call. With price_provider off, resolve_tariff()
answers out of the static profile without opening a socket (driven and counted:
0 requests), and the true shipped default - no provider, no trading - starts no
task at all. What decides whether a request leaves the machine is price_provider
and only that. The literal reading of the ticket's AC2 - drop the `or` - is one
token and is recorded in DECISIONS §3 with what it costs, for the owner.

AND NOTHING TRADES THAT DID NOT TRADE BEFORE. cycle()'s
`if arbitrage.enabled(self.o):` is untouched, and that is graded directly rather
than inferred from the gate having moved: Controller.cycle() is driven on a
resolved provider plan with the peak guard asserted clear, and arbitrage_enabled
is the only option that moves between the rows - false/false give +180 W
("loop -> 180 W") on both the cheap-now and dear-now plans, true/true give
-5000 W and +5000 W ("arbitrage -> ...").

TariffPlan.cheap_now() is deliberately NOT wired, decided rather than inherited
(DECISIONS §4). A provider-backed plan now exists on every configured site, so
Cheap window could read it - and Cheap window feeds the maintenance cycle's grid
top-up, the one place a price moves energy without trading being armed. On a
provider-only site static_status() returns False on every cycle, so adopting it
would take a paid grid top-up from never to sometimes. self.cheap stays on
static_status(); what adoption would take is listed rather than left implied.

THE CHECK THAT WOULD HAVE CAUGHT THIS is test_price.py section 13, and it grades
REACHABILITY FROM A CONFIGURATION rather than the shape of an `if` - the `if` was
exactly what somebody meant to write. amain()'s guards are EVALUATED against real
option dicts, whatever they are spelled as; the call graph under app/ is walked
to see whether the tasks those guards start arrive at resolve_tariff(), wherever
it has moved to; and then the fetch is DRIVEN with a counting transport, because
a graph is an argument and a counted request is an observation. What the
instrument cannot see is printed on every run, largest hole first.

Evidence: 29/29 green. 13 mutations in 14 runs - M10 re-run as M10b once it was
closed - each applied to a fresh cp -a of the clean worktree rather than
reverted (MUTATION.md habit 18), purged, :ro, -B. The
shipped defect - the gate back at arbitrage.enabled(opts), -4 B - is red on
seven named checks. Dropping the `or` (-27 B) is red on the strict-widening row;
removing cycle()'s trading gate (+8 B) is red on both AC3 rows. The instrument
is mutated too (habit 16): _reaches() always True and _task_sites() returning []
are both +0 B and both red.

Two findings are recorded rather than rounded off. provider_id() dropping
.strip() (-8 B) was a real SURVIVOR across four price suites - nothing fed a
padded provider id - and is closed in this commit by the padded-id pair; and the
first draft of the AC3 fixture fed five minutes of P1 telegrams, so whether the
peak guard was blind depended on where the wall clock sat inside the billing
quarter and the armed baseline failed to trade on some runs. It is 900 s now,
and the guard's clear state is a check rather than an assumption.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BwRLw7eKYj2byVdwB6kbjU
2026-09-12 20:58:48 +02:00

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# GoodWe RS485 Controller
Drives a GoodWe ES/BP battery inverter over its RS485 meter bus: holds net grid
exchange at zero, and runs a monthly battery maintenance cycle so the BMS can
balance cells and recalibrate its coulomb counter.
Installers: read `FIELD-GUIDE.md` in the repository. It is not optional reading —
it contains the commissioning gates and the failure modes.
## Before you start
You need:
- A GoodWe **ES / BP family** inverter (AA55 / RS485 meter-bus generation)
- The vendor's meter-emulating controller **disconnected** from the bus
- A T-CAN485 (ESP32) flashed with `firmware/goodwe-master.yaml`
- A grid-power sensor already working in Home Assistant, updating every ~5–10 s
## The safety model, in short
The inverter **holds its last command forever** — it has no meter-timeout. So:
- The ESP32 commands 0 W if this add-on stops refreshing for ~30 s, and keeps
commanding it.
- This add-on commands 0 W when its inputs go missing, when you stop control,
and when it shuts down.
- This add-on commands 0 W **and latches there** if what it is commanding and
what the meter reads point opposite ways for three minutes — see "The
sign-disagreement failsafe" below.
- The **optional RS485 e-stop** is the only thing that covers this machine
dying. Without it, a failed host leaves the battery latched at its last
command until someone intervenes.
- This add-on **raises an alarm — and nothing more —** when the meter keeps
answering with a reading that never changes while the command sits at the
rail. See "The frozen-meter alarm" and, before you rely on it, "Capacity-tariff
exposure of the grid-following loop".
**If anything looks wrong: stop the add-on.** That commands 0 W and the
hardware holds it there.
## Configuration
### ⚠️ There are TWO places to configure this add-on (UX-02)
Since **UX-02** the ingress panel has a **Configuration** page of its own,
beside Home Assistant's *Configuration* tab. Both edit the **same** settings —
there is one options blob, and neither surface is a copy of it.
| | Ingress panel → **Configuration** | Supervisor → **Configuration** tab |
|---|---|---|
| **Use it for** | everyday editing | recovery, and when the add-on is down |
| **Sections, units, help** | real headings, units beside the boxes, the description under each field | one flat list of 71 fields, no headings, no units |
| **Tells you a setting is wrong** | **yes — before you save**, next to the field | no. It knows types and ranges only |
| **Can express a rule spanning two keys** | yes, because it runs the add-on's own validator | **no.** The schema grammar cannot say "must be at or below `max_w`" |
| **Available when the add-on is not running** | **no** — it is served *by* the add-on | **yes** |
| **Editing the inverter list** | cards you add and remove, with the per-entry labels rendered | a repeatable section whose per-entry keys render **raw** on frontend 20250925.1 |
**Which one is authoritative: neither.** The stored options blob is, and both
are editors of it. `DECISIONS/UX-02-two-config-surfaces.md` is the record, with
the measurements behind it.
The one thing you need to know in practice: **the panel refuses to save a
configuration the add-on would not start on, and the Configuration tab does
not.** The tab will happily store `maintenance_charge_w: 2500` beside
`max_w: 2000`; the add-on then exits 78 on its next start, the panel goes down
with it, and the tab is where you fix it. That asymmetry is the reason both
exist.
#### What the panel does when you press Save
1. It runs the **shipped** validator — the same `validate_startup_config()` and
`validate_unit_ranges()` the add-on runs at startup, not a copy of them — and
if anything is refused, **nothing is written** and your edits stay on screen.
2. It re-reads the stored blob and refuses if it changed while you were editing
— someone in the Configuration tab, or you on another device. It names the
keys that moved and shows both values; pressing Save again then writes yours.
3. It writes the whole blob. It does **not** restart: `POST …/options` replaces
the stored options, and a key left out would revert to the shipped default,
so the panel always sends everything it read.
#### ⚠️ Saving costs nothing. Applying costs a control interruption
Stored settings take effect when the add-on next starts. The panel shows which
stored settings are not what the add-on is currently running, and **Restart to
apply** is a separate button with its own confirmation — because the wind-down
commands **0 W on every inverter** before the process exits, and the battery
does nothing until it is back. Nothing else is changed by that restart: a
latched sign-disagreement failsafe is restored from the Store on the way back
up, not cleared.
#### Two range checks can be skipped, and the page says so
Two of the refusals compare a configured ceiling against the setpoint device's
**own** reported range, which means asking Home Assistant. If ESPHome has not
come up, that range is unknown and those two checks are skipped — on the page
and at startup, identically. The page prints a note saying so rather than
looking green for a reason you cannot see. If the device answers later and
disagrees, the add-on refuses to start then, with the same sentence.
#### On a phone
One column, big targets, sections collapsed until you open them, and the
refusals pinned where you cannot scroll past them. It is the screen for
standing in front of the inverter.
### What the Configuration tab actually shows you (UX-01)
Since **UX-01** the add-on ships `translations/en.yaml` and `translations/nl.yaml`,
so Home Assistant's *Configuration* tab renders human labels and a description
for every option instead of the raw option keys. What that does and does not buy
you is worth stating plainly, because it was **measured against the Supervisor
image this site runs** (`ghcr.io/home-assistant/amd64-hassio-supervisor:2026.08.0`)
rather than assumed — `tools/supervisor_shape_probe.py` section F GRADES (it
used only to print) the
whole rendered list, in both languages.
| | |
|---|---|
| **All 71 options are always shown** | The frontend keeps a field when `name in options \|\| required`, and every key is in `options:`. There is no "advanced" fold |
| **Order comes from `schema:`** | `App.schema_ui` is `UiOptions(...)(data["schema"])`, so the **schema half** of `config.yaml` decides the order the tab renders in — not the `options:` half |
| **There are no section headers** | Add-on options are a flat list: no header primitive, no per-option advanced flag, no units on the input, no sliders. Grouping is approximated by **order** plus the `Group · ` prefix in each label, and by nothing else |
| **Groups, in task order** | Hardware → Meter → Limits → Tariff → Maintenance → Safety → Advanced |
| **The description says whether to touch it** | A number that was **derived** names the campaign it came from and says not to change it without re-deriving; a number that is genuinely yours (`max_w`, `peak_cap_w`) says **"THIS IS YOUR NUMBER"**; and `cycle_cost_threshold_eur`, which is neither, says it is an open product question |
| **Dutch falls back per key** | `translations[your language]?.name \|\| translations["en"]?.name \|\| the raw key`. A key missing from `nl.yaml` degrades to English; a key present but wrong does not degrade at all |
| **⚠️ The per-entry keys inside `inverters:` still render raw** | Measured, and negative. A list-of-objects becomes an `object` selector with `multiple: true`, and `ha-selector-object` labels its fields `fields[name].label \|\| name` — the converter sets no `label` and no `translation_key`. The `fields:` translations are shipped and validated (they are the shape Supervisor's own schema defines) but on frontend 20250925.1 they do **not** reach the screen. The `inverters` label and description themselves do |
`test_translations.py` is what stops this rotting: a translation naming an
option that does not exist, or an option with no translation, fails CI — in
either direction, and the check is mutation-tested both ways.
### Sources
| option | required | meaning |
|---|---|---|
| `meter_entity` | yes | Net grid power. **Positive must mean importing** |
| `meter_invert` | | Flip the sign if the meter reports the other way |
| `soc_entity` | yes | Battery state of charge — use the **ESP32's own read** |
| `batt_entity` | yes | Battery power — again the ESP32's read, `+` = discharging |
| `batt_invert` | | Flip if needed |
| `capacity_kwh` | | This pack's usable capacity. Read only to divide the site target between packs by **energy** headroom — see below |
| `setpoint_entity` | yes | The ESPHome `number.*_goodwe_setpoint_w` |
Use the ESP32's readings rather than the inverter's cloud or dongle sensors:
those serve cached values, and a stale reading here ends the maintenance charge
phase having charged nothing.
### More than one inverter (`inverters`)
The six keys above describe **one** inverter, and if that is your site there is
nothing to do here — `inverters` ships empty and empty means *"the flat keys
above describe the one inverter"*. **An install that upgrades into 0.6.0 reads
identically to before: same entities, same rating, same behaviour, no operator
action.**
To run two, declare them. Each entry names its own actuator, its own rating and
its own sensors:
```yaml
setpoint_entity: "" # ⚠️ must be cleared — see below
inverters:
- name: inverter-a
setpoint_entity: number.goodwe_a_setpoint_w
soc_entity: sensor.goodwe_a_soc
batt_entity: sensor.goodwe_a_battery_power
max_w: 5000
capacity_kwh: 15.36
- name: inverter-b
setpoint_entity: number.goodwe_b_setpoint_w
soc_entity: sensor.goodwe_b_soc
batt_entity: sensor.goodwe_b_battery_power
max_w: 4600
capacity_kwh: 20.48
```
⚠️ **The 4600 W is inverter B's *datasheet* figure, not a measured one.** B is a
GoodWe GW5048D-ES (serial `55048ESU22AW0992`, identified 2026-09-04) whose
datasheet gives max charging and discharging power as 4600 W; with nothing
connected to its PV inputs the battery path is the ceiling, not the 5000 VA AC
nameplate. The datasheet prints that number under *Battery Input Data*, so it
may be a DC figure, while `max_w` is graded against register `0x0518` — the
inverter's own **AC** power. If it is DC the AC-side ceiling is nearer 4324 W.
`max_w: 4600` is still the right thing to configure, because the freeze rail is
`min(max_w, dev_max)` and the device range read off the unit is what binds.
`goodwe/NOTES.md` §1.1b records both readings and picks neither.
| per-entry key | required | meaning |
|---|---|---|
| `name` | yes | Short identifier. It namespaces this unit's SAFETY-02 latch, heartbeat and write bookkeeping in the add-on's state file, so **two units may not share one** |
| `setpoint_entity` | yes | This inverter's own ESPHome `number.*_goodwe_setpoint_w` |
| `max_w` | yes | The supervised cap on what may be written to **this** inverter. The site's ceiling is the **sum** |
| `soc_entity` | | This pack's state of charge |
| `batt_entity` | | This unit's battery power, `+` = discharging |
| `batt_invert` | | Flip if needed |
⚠️ **Nothing is inherited.** An entry that leaves out `soc_entity` has **no SoC
sensor** — it does *not* fall back to the flat one. That is deliberate: every
per-device value became per-instance in 0.5.x precisely so that no inverter is
ever graded against a sibling's numbers, and a silent fallback would rebuild
that in YAML. `name`, `setpoint_entity` and `max_w` are required of every entry
for the same reason: there is no rating to borrow.
⚠️ **Clear the flat `setpoint_entity` when you declare a roster,** or the add-on
refuses to start and says so. It is the single-inverter form and it is not read
once a roster exists, so leaving it set means one of two things: it names an
entity an entry also names — two writers on one actuator, which specs §1.5 makes
a non-goal and the add-on refuses outright — or it names a different one, which
nothing would ever write, leaving a site running quietly smaller than its
configuration reads. `soc_entity`, `batt_entity`, `batt_invert` and `max_w`
cannot be blanked (the schema gives them no empty value); they are simply not
read, and the add-on writes one line into its action log at every start saying
so.
⚠️ **Two inverters naming the same `setpoint_entity` are refused,** whichever
keys they are declared under and whatever the capitalisation. Two independent
setpoints on one inverter is the arbitration problem this add-on exists not to
have.
⚠️ **Update the add-on first, then add the roster.** Home Assistant validates the
options you save against the schema of the version that is *installed*, so
`inverters` cannot be set before 0.6.0 is installed. The order is: update, then
configure.
⚠️ **Going the other way — downgrading with a roster configured — is recoverable
but NOT uneventful, and the add-on will not start until you refill a field.**
The *schema* side is fine: the older version's schema has no `inverters` key, so
it drops the key with a warning rather than refusing the whole blob (measured —
`DECISIONS/CFG-04-inverter-roster.md` §E). The *add-on* side is not. Rule 9(e)
requires the flat `setpoint_entity` be **cleared** when a roster is declared, so
a config that downgrades cleanly is by construction a config whose flat
actuator is blank — and the older version has nothing else to write to. It stops
at startup validation with a refusal naming `setpoint_entity`, which is loud and
in the log rather than silent, but it is an outage until someone puts the
single-inverter entity back in that field. **Before downgrading, write down the
`setpoint_entity` of the unit you want to keep running.**
#### How the site target is divided between the packs (OPT-09)
Two packs do not get half each **from 0.8.0 onwards**. ⚠️ **On 0.7.0 and every
version before it the split is a fixed 50/50 regardless of what either pack can
do** — that is the defect this section describes the fix for, so if the add-on
you are running reports 0.7.0, none of what follows is happening yet. From 0.8.0
the split is driven by two separate things, and it is worth knowing which is
which, because only one of them is a rule:
* **The envelope — a permission.** A pack whose own state of charge is at or
under its own `bms_soc_floor` is **not asked to discharge**; a pack at 100 %
is **not asked to charge**. Its share goes to the sibling, inside that
sibling's own rating. This is absolute: the allocator cannot exceed it.
* **The weights — a preference.** Between those limits, each pack is asked for
the fraction of the site target that matches its **energy headroom**: the kWh
it has above its own cut-out when the site is discharging, the kWh it has
below full when the site is charging. That is what `capacity_kwh` is for.
⚠️ **`capacity_kwh` is optional, and it is all-or-nothing.** Leave it out
everywhere and the add-on has no opinion about the split — the target is divided
evenly, exactly as it was before. Fill it in on **every** entry or on none: a
pack measured in kWh beside one that is not is not a comparison, and the add-on
refuses to start rather than ignore half of what you typed.
⚠️ **Why energy and not the rating.** The two packs here pull in opposite
directions — A is 5000 W with 15.36 kWh, B is 4600 W with 20.48 kWh, so B has
about a third more energy and about 8 % less power. Dividing by rating hands the
work to A; dividing by energy hands it to B. The question a split is answering is
"which pack can sustain its share for the hour", so it is the energy one. Each
inverter's own rating still binds its own share, separately, through `max_w`.
⚠️ **What the weights will NOT do for you, stated plainly.** They are a comfort
choice about which pack does the work. They are **not** a way to make the site
deliver. A unit that is at its energy limit — or that has simply stopped
responding — does not hand its load to its sibling: the loop sees the shortfall,
freezes, and the site runs short by that unit's share. Weighting a failing unit
down does not fix that, because when the healthy unit reaches its own rating the
allocator hands the remainder to the down-weighted one anyway rather than leave
watts unplaced. What you get instead is honesty: the action log reports the watts
that could not be placed (`ALLOCATOR: +2000 W of the site target could not be
placed on any inverter`), and a unit that accepts its share and does not produce
it is named by the delivery alarm (SAFETY-42, above).
⚠️ **At one inverter none of this applies and nothing changed.** There is no
split to weight, `capacity_kwh` is not read, and no envelope is closed —
self-consumption still discharges down to the battery's own cut-out exactly as
it always has.
### What appears in Home Assistant at two inverters
**Nothing you already have changes.** The eight entities this add-on has always
published — `Setpoint`, `Grid power`, `Battery power`, `Battery SoC`,
`Circulating power`, `Maintenance phase`, `Controller status`, `P1 sample age` —
keep their device, their `unique_id`s and therefore their **entity ids and their
whole recorded history**. At a roster of one, nothing new is announced at all:
no second device, no renamed entity, not one added topic.
Declare a second inverter and **four rows per unit** appear beside them:
| per-unit row | what it is |
|---|---|
| `Setpoint` | this unit's own share of the site target — the number its heartbeat re-emits |
| `Battery power` | this unit's own reading, `+` = discharging |
| `Battery SoC` | **this** pack. The site `Battery SoC` row is the *emptiest* pack, which may be the other one |
| `Sign latch` | this unit's SAFETY-02 latch: `tripped` or `clear` |
⚠️ **The devices are deliberately asymmetric, and it is not an oversight.** The
first inverter's rows are added to the **existing** *GoodWe* device; every later
inverter gets its **own** device (*GoodWe Inverter B*), shown in Home Assistant
as connected via the controller. Home Assistant composes an entity id from the
**device name plus the entity name**, so giving the first inverter a device of
its own would rename every entity you already have — and because HA keeps the id
it composed at first discovery, you would get a new entity beside a dead one:
the history stays on the old id and every dashboard, template and automation
naming it silently stops updating. The entity ids come out symmetric anyway —
`sensor.goodwe_inverter_a_battery_power` beside
`sensor.goodwe_inverter_b_battery_power`.
**Do not rename the device.** Not in this add-on, and not in Home Assistant's
device page. It is half of every entity id, including
`sensor.goodwe_p1_sample_age`, which the ESP32's stale-input watchdog subscribes
to; a rename disarms that guard by leaving it waiting for a state that never
arrives, and it fails silently and looks correct.
**`Grid power` and `P1 sample age` stay site-scoped and are announced once.**
There is one P1 meter and one grid connection; a per-inverter copy would invent
two of a thing there is one of, and `P1 sample age` is a safety input. Same for
`Circulating power` (it is a property of the *set* of inverters), the controller
status, the maintenance phase and the capacity-tariff peak.
⚠️ **Two roster names that differ only in punctuation or case** — `inverter-b`
and `Inverter B` — are two names to the validator and one id once slugged. The
add-on gives the second one a `_2` suffix so nothing collides, but the ids you
get then depend on roster order. Give your inverters plainly different names.
### P1 meter ingestion
`meter_entity` above expects one signed sensor, which usually means a template
someone wrote by hand. Setting `meter_source` moves the whole derivation into
the add-on, where it is done once and tested, and replaces `meter_entity`
entirely.
Which mode you want depends on what your P1 reader publishes, and there are two
shapes in the wild:
- **Two unsigned registers**, consumption and injection, which is what a Belgian
P1 read over DSMR gives you → `ha_dsmr`, or `mqtt_p1` for a bridge. The add-on
subtracts them.
- **One signed figure**, positive = import and negative = export, which is what
a HomeWizard P1 gives you (`sensor.p1_meter_active_power`) → `ha_signed`. The
add-on splits it. `ha_dsmr` **cannot** read this: it wants two registers and
rejects a negative one outright, which is every exporting telegram.
Either way, do not build the missing shape out of template sensors. The point of
`meter_source` is that the sign convention is derived in one tested place rather
than in YAML nobody reviews underneath a safety input.
> ✅ **If your meter is a HomeWizard P1, use `homewizard_local`, not
> `ha_signed`.** It reads the same meter and produces the same numbers, but it
> polls the meter directly instead of watching a Home Assistant entity — and
> that is the difference between an age sensor a watchdog can threshold and one
> it cannot. See "`sensor.p1_sample_age_s`" below; `ha_signed` remains for
> installs where the meter is only reachable through Home Assistant.
> ⚠️ **`ha_dsmr` and `mqtt_p1` have never processed a telegram from real
> hardware.** No meter in this installation uses either one. Both were written
> to the assumption in `specs.md` §5.2 that a Belgian P1 exposes two unsigned
> registers, and the meter actually fitted here does not — it is the HomeWizard
> P1 that `ha_signed` reads. They are covered by the unit checks in `test_p1.py`
> and by an end-to-end test against a fake Home Assistant, and nothing more.
>
> This is recorded because the realistic way it bites is someone debugging a
> meter problem months from now treating those two paths as proven and looking
> for the fault elsewhere. If you are the first person to point one at a real
> meter, expect to find something, and please update this note when you do.
| option | default | meaning |
|---|---|---|
| `meter_source` | `off` | `off` keeps `meter_entity`. `ha_dsmr` subscribes to the DSMR integration over the HA WebSocket; `mqtt_p1` reads a topic; `ha_signed` subscribes to one signed entity over the HA WebSocket; `homewizard_local` polls a HomeWizard P1's own local API, bypassing Home Assistant |
| `meter_phases` | 1 | 1 or 3. Must match the telegram, or every telegram is rejected and logged |
| `meter_max_age_s` | 30 | Beyond this the reading is stale and grid power reads as *missing*. On its own it does **not** command 0 W — see the timing note below. It is also the longest a reading is held forward into the 15-minute average |
| `meter_poll_s` | 5 | `homewizard_local` only. Seconds between polls. **Must be well under `meter_max_age_s`** — see below |
| `p1_host` | | `homewizard_local` only. The meter's own address, `host` or `host:port` (e.g. `192.168.2.250`) |
| `meter_mqtt_topic` | | `mqtt_p1` only |
| `p1_import_entity` | | The **unsigned** consumption sensor. Do not point this at a signed template |
| `p1_export_entity` | | The **unsigned** injection sensor |
| `p1_phase_import_entities` | `[]` | L1..L3, in order. Needed for the capacity-tariff peak on a three-phase connection |
| `p1_phase_export_entities` | `[]` | L1..L3, in order |
| `p1_net_entity` | | `ha_signed` only. The **signed** net-power sensor: `+` import, `-` export |
| `p1_phase_net_entities` | `[]` | `ha_signed` only. L1..L3, in order, each signed the same way. Needed for the capacity-tariff peak on a three-phase connection. **The list length must equal `meter_phases`** |
Both per-phase lists are checked against `meter_phases` **once at startup**: a
list of the wrong length disables P1 ingestion with an error in the log, rather
than letting every telegram fail its phase-count check one at a time. Leaving
the list empty is fine and is not an error — you simply get no per-phase
figures, and therefore no capacity-tariff peak. On a three-phase connection
that is a much bigger omission than it looks: on a surveyed reading here the
phases carried 2769 W of import while the connection netted 187 W, so the
billed quantity is understated roughly fifteenfold if the phases are missing.
#### How long a dead meter takes to reach 0 W
`meter_max_age_s` and `stale_input_s` **stack**. They are two different clocks
and neither one is the whole answer:
| step | option | default |
|---|---|---|
| telegrams stop, P1 sample goes stale, grid power starts reading *missing* | `meter_max_age_s` | 30 s |
| inputs have been missing long enough for the loop to command 0 W | `stale_input_s` | 15 s |
| **total, meter death → 0 W commanded by this add-on** | | **45 s** |
So in P1 mode `stale_input_s` is *not* "how long inputs may be missing before
commanding 0 W" measured from the meter dying — it is measured from the moment
the P1 sample already went stale. Size the pair together: the ESP32's own
watchdog commands 0 W after ~30 s of silence from this add-on regardless, and
that layer is unaffected by either option.
#### How long a FROZEN inverter power register takes to reach 0 W
A third clock, and it is a different failure from the one above: the entity is
still there and still answering — it has simply stopped changing. Before
SAFETY-37 that read as a healthy measurement for ever, which is what happened on
2026-09-02 (HW-01): a value held for 6 h 25 m while the pack drained to its
floor, and every detector read healthy throughout.
`Inverter.batt` — the inverter's own AC power, register `0x0518` — is now
withheld from the control path when **all three** of these are true:
| | |
|---|---|
| the reading has not changed for | **35 s** |
| **and** the command standing on that inverter is over | **250 W** |
| **and** that command has travelled, since the reading last moved, over | **250 W** |
All three, because a converged site legitimately repeats one power figure for
minutes — measured at up to **263 s** over 30 days of this house's own meter —
and a site at rest is not owed movement. It is only when the controller has
*asked the inverter to move* and the register has not answered that the reading
is treated as missing.
**A withheld reading is a MISSING INPUT**, so it joins the `stale_input_s` clock
above: 35 s to withhold, then 15 s of hold, then 0 W. It clears itself the
instant the register reports a different value — one watt is enough, and this
register dithers ±1 W while holding — so a working inverter clears it on its
next 10 s publish. There is **no option to configure**: the 35 s is derived from
the ESPHome publish interval and the two watchdog windows it has to stay inside,
and the add-on's own checks refuse a value that does not.
⚠️ **What this does NOT catch: a register whose value is WRONG rather than
STOPPED**, including a dead publisher whose last two samples happen to
alternate. Detecting that needs an arrival stamp inside the ESP32 firmware
itself, which is TEL-06.
There is **no fallback to an inverter-side power figure**, deliberately. The
inverter's own AC power tracks its battery almost perfectly and the real meter
hardly at all, so a controller that failed over to it would be regulating
against its own output while looking healthy.
The `mqtt_p1` payload is one JSON object per telegram, and the schema is strict —
a key it does not recognise is a telegram from something other than what was
tested, and guessing a key here means guessing a kilowatt:
```json
{"import_w": 1234.0,
"export_w": 0.0,
"phases": [{"import_w": 500, "export_w": 0},
{"import_w": 400, "export_w": 0},
{"import_w": 334, "export_w": 0}],
"timestamp": "2026-08-24T18:00:05+02:00"}
```
`phases` and `timestamp` are optional; `timestamp` must carry a UTC offset. Where
it is present it is used for the age, which is what stops a retained message
replayed on reconnect from presenting a ten-minute-old reading as current.
#### `homewizard_local` — polling the meter instead of Home Assistant
Set `p1_host` to the meter's address and the add-on does `GET /api/v1/data` on
it every `meter_poll_s` seconds, reading `active_power_w` (signed, same
convention as `ha_signed`) and the three `active_power_l{1,2,3}_w` fields. Home
Assistant is not involved: no entity, no WebSocket, no integration to
mis-configure. Per-phase figures are used only when the meter serves all
`meter_phases` of them — a single-phase meter returns `null` for L2/L3, and the
connection-level reading is still accepted on its own.
**Why this mode exists:** every HTTP response is an *arrival*. The meter
answered, now, with its current reading — whether or not the number moved. That
is the signal `sensor.p1_sample_age_s` needs and the one Home Assistant cannot
give it at all (see the note below). It is also simply fewer moving parts: the
five-second cadence is the meter's own, rather than an integration's polling of
it re-published as a state change.
**Cadence.** The age is never fresher than the poll interval, so:
| | |
|---|---|
| meter's own update rate | ~5.0 s (measured 4.97 s) |
| `meter_poll_s` default | 5 s — nothing to gain below the meter's own rate |
| `meter_max_age_s` default | 30 s, i.e. six polls of headroom |
| `meter_poll_s >= meter_max_age_s` | **refused at startup** — every reading would be stale before its successor arrived |
| `meter_poll_s > meter_max_age_s / 2` | warned — one missed poll makes the reading stale |
A failed poll — timeout, connection refused, non-200, unparseable body — is a
**missing** reading. It submits nothing, so the reading does not become 0 W, the
last good value and its timestamp are left alone, and the age goes on climbing.
That is exactly what a dead meter should look like.
**What it still cannot see: a frozen meter.** A meter that answers `200 OK`
forever with a stale number is arriving, so no arrival detector — this one
included — can tell it from a healthy one. The local API does expose the raw
material the HA path never had (the `total_power_*_kwh` registers stop
advancing), and the transport tracks it as `unchanged_s`, but it is deliberately
*not* folded into the age and *not* thresholded: this controller regulates grid
power toward ~0 W, and at a converged −10 W the export register needs six
minutes to move by its 1 Wh resolution while the power figure legitimately
repeats. Thresholding that at 30 s would rebuild the false-trip limit cycle at
the exact operating point the controller aims for. Freeze detection is a
separate problem and needs the low-power case solved first.
You read it yourself instead: the add-on's status page shows it on the P1 line,
as `… 4 rejected, measurement unchanged for 312 s`. On a house drawing real
power that figure stays in the seconds; minutes of it while the load is clearly
not near zero is the meter to go and look at.
#### `sensor.p1_sample_age_s`
Published over MQTT discovery whenever a broker is available: **seconds since the
newest accepted telegram**, refreshed every second rather than only when a
telegram lands. The ESP32's stale-input watchdog subscribes to this exact entity
id, so do not rename it.
The reason it is recomputed against the clock is that Home Assistant only pushes
a state when the state *changes*. A meter sitting at a genuinely constant reading
emits nothing, which is indistinguishable — to anything watching the value — from
a meter that has died. Watching the age instead separates the two: it climbs when
telegrams stop and resets when they arrive, whatever the reading says.
The entity is only created when `meter_source` is not `off`. With P1 ingestion
disabled there is nothing feeding it, and an age sensor climbing with no ingester
behind it would trip the firmware watchdog on a system that is working fine.
> **Known limit, `mqtt_p1`.** The age measures *arrival*. On the MQTT path a
> bridge that is stuck republishing its last telegram keeps arriving, so the age
> stays near zero and a frozen meter still looks fresh. Detecting *that* needs a
> change-detector rather than an arrival-detector, and it is not in this version.
> ⚠️ **Known limit, `ha_signed` — do not drive a watchdog off this age yet.**
> On the HA WebSocket paths the age is stamped when a `state_changed` arrives,
> which means it measures *time since the value last changed*, not time since
> the meter last reported. Home Assistant offers nothing better: a repeated
> reading produces no `state_changed`, does **not** advance `last_reported` on
> either the REST or the WebSocket serialiser, and `state_reported` cannot be
> subscribed to over the WebSocket at all (`Event filter is required for event
> state_reported`). All three measured on the ENV-01 rig against the real
> HomeWizard integration with the meter frozen: 0 `state_changed` in 70 s and no
> timestamp movement anywhere.
>
> `ha_dsmr` mostly escapes this because a DSMR telegram updates several entities
> and something in the set almost always moves. **`ha_signed` has exactly one
> entity, so a healthy meter under a flat load is indistinguishable from a dead
> one.** This is not hypothetical: in our own captures
> (`sim/scenarios/ha-p1_meter_active_power-2026-08-20.json`) the real house meter
> went **42.2 s and 97.0 s** between changes, and 23 Aug peaks at 29.1 s — all
> past the default `meter_max_age_s` of 30.
>
> So `sensor.p1_sample_age_s` on `ha_signed` is safe to *read*, and it is
> correct whenever the value is moving, but it must not yet be thresholded by
> the ESP32 stale-input watchdog: a quiet house would trip the battery to 0 W.
> Raising `meter_max_age_s` is **not** the fix — the two conditions produce an
> identical signal, so a bigger number only chooses which of the two errors you
> get. The real fix is an arrival stamp the meter itself provides — and that now
> exists: **`meter_source: homewizard_local`**. If you have a HomeWizard P1,
> switch to it. If your meter is only reachable through Home Assistant, this
> limit still applies to you and the watchdog threshold still must not be armed.
**Where the age is trustworthy:**
| mode | the age measures | safe to threshold from firmware |
|---|---|---|
| `homewizard_local` | time since the meter **answered** | **yes** — every HTTP response is an arrival |
| `ha_dsmr` | time since one of several entities changed | no — statistically usually fine, which is a masked bug, not an absent one |
| `ha_signed` | time since the one entity changed | **no** — see above |
| `mqtt_p1` | time since a message arrived | arrivals yes, but a stuck bridge republishing keeps arriving |
### Control
| option | default | meaning |
|---|---|---|
| `max_w` | 2000 | Hard limit on what may be commanded. Start low, raise after commissioning. **Not read when `inverters` is declared** — each entry carries its own, and the site ceiling is their sum |
| `gain` | 0.6 | Correction per cycle. **At the limit — do not raise** |
| `slew_w` | 0 | Largest change in one cycle. **0 means follow the rail** - `max_w / 9`, i.e. the loop takes the plant's own measured ~18 s settling time to cross its whole output range at the 2 s tick the live install runs. 222 W at `max_w: 2000`, 556 W at 5000, 1067 W at a ~9600 W two-inverter site. A fixed number is accepted and never silently reduced, but one FASTER than the rail implies is refused at startup (SAFETY-39): `slew_w: 1000` against `max_w: 5000` crossed the rail in 10 s against an 18 s plant, and on 2026-09-05 drove the meter from 3.4 kW of export to 2.8 kW of import |
| `deadband_w` | 15 | Ignore errors smaller than this |
| `target_grid_w` | -10 | What the meter should rest at. Negative = a slight export |
| `step_w` | 10 | Quantisation |
| `saturation_w` | 500 | Divergence that counts as "the inverter is at a limit" |
| `saturation_cycles` | 3 | How many consecutive cycles before freezing. A cycle is one meter update or `cycle_floor_s`, whichever comes first - see the note below. **Do not set to 1**. Every value this file accepts (1-10) is below the freeze's own release bound of 12 cycles, so no accepted setting can stop the block engaging - see SAFETY-13, below |
| `integrator_max_w` | 0 | Bound on the loop's accumulator, and 0 means "same as `max_w`". Caps how much stale error can be waiting to unwind when the sign flips. **Do not raise it above `max_w`** - the output clamp already bounds what is commanded, so the only thing extra headroom buys is more cycles of wrong-direction power after every saturation event. Lowering it below `max_w` is the useful direction |
| `heartbeat_s` | 10 | Refresh interval; must stay well under the firmware watchdog |
| `cycle_floor_s` | 15 | The longest the loop may go without evaluating. A deadline on the gap between cycles, reset by every cycle — on a healthy meter it never elapses and changes nothing. Raise it only if your meter is slower than ~10 s; it must stay under `meter_max_age_s`, past which there is no reading to evaluate anyway |
| `stale_input_s` | 15 | How long inputs may be missing before commanding 0 W. In P1 mode this clock starts only *after* `meter_max_age_s` has already expired — the two stack, see "How long a dead meter takes to reach 0 W" |
| `auto_start` | false | Start controlling on boot (only after commissioning) |
| `sign_disagree_w` | 300 | Both the command and the meter must exceed this before a sign difference counts. Must stay **below `max_w`** or the watchdog can never fire, and the add-on refuses to start |
| `sign_disagree_s` | 180 | How long they must stay opposed, continuously, before the failsafe trips |
| `unit_sign_disagree_w` | 250 | **Two or more inverters only.** Both a unit's own share and its own measured power must exceed this before their sign difference counts. It is `saturation_w / 2`, so the smallest divergence it can see is exactly the gap at which the loop already calls the inverter "not following". Must stay **below `max_w`** or it can never fire, and the add-on refuses to start |
| `unit_sign_disagree_s` | 85 | **Two or more inverters only.** How long one unit's command and its own power must stay opposed before that unit is parked |
| `site_sign_disagree_w` | 300 | **Two or more inverters only.** Threshold for the site-wide check - the sum of the commands against the meter. The same 300 W as `sign_disagree_w`, for the same reason: near zero the sign is noise |
| `site_sign_disagree_s` | 325 | **Two or more inverters only.** How long the site's total command and the meter must stay opposed before every inverter is parked. Longer than `sign_disagree_s` because the command has to cross zero over a rail that is the sum of the roster, at a `slew_w` that is not - measured at 110 s with one inverter and 215 s with two |
| `delivery_hold_s` | 185 | **Two or more inverters only.** How long one inverter may stand at a discharge share it is not producing - short by more than `saturation_w`, with no reason this add-on can read - while at least one sibling is **not** in that state, before it is named. **It reports; it does not act.** Nothing is commanded differently and the site goes on running short by that unit's share |
#### The sign-disagreement failsafe
If the setpoint this add-on is emitting and the grid figure it is regulating on
point **opposite ways** — charging the battery while the house imports, or
discharging it while the house exports — with both over `sign_disagree_w`, for
`sign_disagree_s` **continuously**, the add-on commands **0 W** and holds it
there. The banner reads `FAILSAFE`, the commissioning list says which two
numbers disagreed and for how long, and the `Controller status` entity reports
`failsafe`.
#### ⚠️ At two or more inverters this is TWO checks, not one (SAFETY-30)
The paragraph above describes what a **one-inverter** install does, and it is
unchanged: there is one meter, one actuator, and comparing the command against
the meter is comparing a thing with a view of itself.
With a second inverter that stops being true. The meter answers for **both**
units, so a command put on one of them can be opposed to it with nothing wrong
(inverter A charging while inverter B discharges more), and - the worse
direction - a unit genuinely driving the wrong way can be **hidden**, because its
sibling's watts arrive at the meter and the sum looks healthy. So the check
splits in two, and they are different faults:
- **Per inverter** — that unit's own share against **its own measured power**
(the `batt_entity` reading, register 0x0518). This catches *"this inverter is
not doing what it was told"*. Only that inverter is parked; the site keeps
running on the one that works. Thresholds: `unit_sign_disagree_w` /
`unit_sign_disagree_s`.
- **Site-wide** — the **sum** of what every inverter has standing, against the
meter. This catches *"the site as a whole is pushing the wrong way"*, which no
per-inverter check can see because every unit may be faithfully executing its
share of a number that is itself wrong. **Every** inverter is parked and the
banner names the site rather than an inverter. Thresholds:
`site_sign_disagree_w` / `site_sign_disagree_s`, latched under flat
`site_sign_tripped` in `/data/state.json`.
Both latch, both are cleared by the same *stop, then start*, and both survive a
restart. **On a one-inverter install neither pair does anything at all** - the
two questions are the same question there, and only the check described above is
armed.
This is **not** the circulating-power alarm further down: that one compares the
inverters *against each other* and catches them pushing power through each other,
which nets to zero at the meter and which no command is evidence about. It is
also not the saturation freeze, which is a *magnitude* test that shapes the loop
rather than a *direction* test that parks an inverter.
**It does not clear itself, and restarting the add-on does not clear it either.**
Pressing *Start / stop control* twice — stop, then start — is the only thing that
does. That is deliberate on both counts:
- Commanding 0 W removes the command side of the comparison, so the disagreement
always vanishes the instant the trip works. A watchdog that took that as proof
the fault was over would hand the inverter straight back to the loop that was
driving the wrong way, three minutes later, forever.
- The trip is written to `/data/state.json` — under
`unit/<inverter>/sign_tripped`, one key per inverter since DEV-02, so a trip
caused by one inverter cannot latch another — and restored on startup. The
pre-DEV-02 flat `sign_tripped` is written and cleared alongside it as the
**rollback view**, so downgrading the add-on past DEV-02 still finds the
latch, and a trip taken while the install is rolled back is re-armed by the
version that comes back up rather than silently lost. Restarting
the add-on is the first thing most people try when they see a red banner, and
a latch that a restart clears would bring the controller back **armed, into the
same fault, unattended** — and under a Supervisor that restarts a crashed add-on
automatically, would do so in a loop. After a restart the banner, the 0 W and
the recorded reason are all still there.
**What it is for.** This is a loop-integrity check: it asks whether the loop's
output direction still matches the input state it was regulating. It catches a
polarity error anywhere between the meter and the wire, and an integrator so far
wound up that unwinding takes minutes. It is the check that would have caught all
four episodes of 2026-08-20, when a commercial controller charged the battery out
of the grid, four times, for up to 77 minutes at a time.
**What it is not for.** It does not detect an inverter that acts opposite to what
it was told — that moves the meter *further* the same way, so command and meter
agree while everything runs away. That is the saturation freeze's job
(`saturation_w` / `saturation_cycles`), which compares the command against the
battery's actual power. The two checks are complementary and neither replaces the
other.
**Why it will not false-trip on ordinary operation.** A battery that refuses a
command (empty, full, standby) leaves the meter where it was, so command and
meter agree. A frozen meter drives the loop into agreeing with it. Around the
resting point both signals are inside the 300 W gate, so the deadband can never
produce one. A load step does flip the meter's sign before the loop catches up —
measured on a full captured day, the longest such crossing is 30 s, against a
180 s window. And the watchdog is **disarmed whenever the grid-following loop is
not what is driving**: a maintenance grid charge opposes the meter by design and
must not be mistaken for a fault.
Both numbers are measured rather than chosen, and are exposed only because the
ticket requires defaults rather than constants. On the captured healthy day sign
agreement is 93.4 %; on the four captured fault clusters it is 0.3 %, 0.9 %,
10.5 % and 0.0 %. There is no reason to move either value without a capture that
says so.
#### ⚠️ A unit that stops DELIVERING is a third fault again (SAFETY-42)
The two checks above both key on **direction**. A unit sitting at **0 W against
a non-zero share** has no direction: it is not pushing the wrong way, it is
**absent**. So the per-unit sign gate never opens (it needs opposition on both
sides of `unit_sign_disagree_w`), the site sum still agrees with the meter in
direction, and circulating power is exactly **zero** — that quantity needs two
units pulling *against* each other, and one of these is pulling nowhere.
The only thing that does fire is the **saturation freeze**, and this add-on's own
code calls that an alarm operators learn to ignore, because a loop can be legally
saturated all day: a cold pack, a curtailed inverter, an export limit.
So `delivery_hold_s` grades a different quantity — **how many watts of a
discharge share did not arrive** — and makes it readable with a reduction that
only exists once there is more than one inverter:
> a unit is named while it is short of its share by more than `saturation_w`,
> **with nothing this add-on can read to explain it**, and the units in that
> state are **fewer than the units that were asked to discharge**.
Both halves matter, and the second is why this cannot fire on a
one-inverter install at all:
- **"nothing explains it"** is what keeps a legitimately empty pack out. A pack
at or below its own `bms_soc_floor` cannot discharge, and that is the *only*
fact this add-on holds that distinguishes an empty pack from a wedged one —
the two are otherwise identical at the unit and at the meter, watt for watt.
A unit the add-on has already dropped from the split, or parked by a sign
trip, is likewise accounted for.
- **"fewer than were asked"** is what keeps a whole-site cause out. A derate this
add-on cannot see — thermal, grid-code, DC-side — hits every unit. One box that
has stopped listening does not. If *every* unit that was asked is short and
unexplained, nothing is reported: there is no instrument here that tells that
from a plant which simply cannot deliver.
**It reports. It does not act.** Commanding an inverter that has stopped
listening achieves nothing — that happened on this hardware once for 6 h 25 m —
and the only re-allocation this add-on can express is all-or-nothing, which
would throw away the output of a unit delivering *part* of its share. So the
loop is untouched, the sibling keeps regulating, and the site keeps running
**short by that unit's share** until somebody looks. The status page shows it as
a caution rather than a failure for exactly that reason: the controller has not
stopped.
The report **survives a Home Assistant restart** (`unit/<name>/delivery_tripped`
in the add-on's own state file) and the notification is re-raised on the next
start, because a `persistent_notification` is in memory and that is precisely how
the 2026-09-02 outage went unseen. It is cleared by pressing **Start**, like the
other latches.
The banner reads **`NOT DELIVERING — <unit> …`** as a *warning*, not a failure,
and it **displaces** `Running — holding grid at zero`. That last sentence is a
claim the site cannot make while a unit is absent, and a page that goes on
reading healthy while the fault runs is the whole shape this check exists to
remove.
**Charge shares are not graded**, and that is a stated gap rather than an
oversight: there is no configured charge ceiling anywhere in this add-on, so a
pack in constant-voltage taper — which legitimately takes hundreds of watts less
than it is told, for tens of minutes — could not be explained, and arming that
direction would fire on the taper of every maintenance charge.
#### Saturation is counted in cycles, not seconds
The specification states the saturation window as **"> 10 s"**. This add-on counts
**cycles** instead, and that is a deliberate, accepted deviation rather than an
oversight - the acceptance criterion is not met as literally written.
A cycle here is one meter update **or `cycle_floor_s` elapsing, whichever comes
first**. At the reference P1's ~5 s update rate the default of 3 cycles is usually
around 15 s, and the worst case is bounded at `3 x cycle_floor_s` = 45 s. It is still
not the 10 s the specification asks for, so the deviation stands - but it is now a
bounded number rather than an open one.
⚠️ **This passage used to say something different, and the second half of it was
wrong.** Until SAFETY-12 the loop ran only when the meter value *changed*, so a meter
that repeated a value stalled the counter for as long as it repeated, with no upper
bound at all. That was defended here on the grounds that "a stalled counter is a
detection-latency limit and not a runaway risk - the condition that stalls it stops the
whole loop, so nothing accumulates while it is stalled". That argument covers
**integrator windup and nothing else**. The hazard it misses is **staleness**: while the
loop was stopped the heartbeat kept re-emitting the last command and the firmware kept
putting it on the wire every 2 s, so a command computed from an old reading went on
being executed through a real load change, with every indicator reading healthy.
Measured on the rig during TEL-05: 70 s at a literally constant 350.0 W, 14 arrivals,
zero control cycles.
The half that survives is the first one: the control law is still a pure function with
no clock, and the wall-clock window still lives in `Controller`, which has one - see
`run_control()`. What changed is that the controller now enforces a floor on the gap
between cycles, so `saturation_cycles` finally means a bounded number of seconds.
If a tighter window matters on your site, lower `cycle_floor_s` (not below your meter's
update interval, or the floor starts firing on a healthy meter) or raise
`saturation_cycles` for a fast meter.
**This is not a freeze detector, and it deliberately cannot be one.** Nothing here
decides whether a repeated reading is true — see `unchanged_s` in the meter section for
why no threshold on that is safe at the converged operating point. The floor only stops
"the number is the same" from meaning "do not think". The consequence is worth stating
plainly: against a meter that is genuinely frozen at a wrong value, the loop will now
correct toward that wrong value instead of holding a stale command. It is bounded by
`max_w`, the arbiter and the device rating, and it is the same thing that already
happened to a lying meter whose value merely jittered — bit-exact repetition was never a
safety property.
#### When the freeze lets go, and when it deliberately never does (SAFETY-13)
While the loop is frozen the command's **magnitude may fall but never rise**. That is
the anti-windup rule, and at `prev_w == 0` it reads as a refusal to *start*: with
nothing commanded there is no magnitude left to fall, so a charge cannot begin. That
refusal is deliberate. Commanding 0 W while the inverter reports hundreds of watts
means something is driving the actuator that this add-on did not ask, and starting to
push power the other way into it is how two controllers end up fighting over one
actuator — the configuration §1.5 of the specification rules out.
**What was missing was an end to it.** Nothing cleared the block: not the error growing,
not the integrator moving, not time. The exit is now explicit, and *which* freezes get
one is the decision:
| the inverter is… | can it clear itself? | what happens now |
|---|---|---|
| doing **less** than the command, in the command's own direction — a cold pack, a curtailment, an export cap | **yes.** The command is pinned at something the inverter can reach, so it catches up and the freeze clears | unchanged: frozen for as long as it lasts, with no exit |
| doing something **outside** what the command can explain — overshooting it, or the opposite sign | **not necessarily.** If another writer is on the actuator, clearing the freeze needs the inverter to track *our* command and the other writer is what stops it, so nothing ends it | the freeze releases once the divergence has outlasted the plant that could otherwise have explained it — see *what `freeze-released` actually tells you*, below, because this row is also where our own ramp lands |
The second row's threshold is the plant's own measured settling time — **the slower of
the two directions it was measured in.** The 2026-08-22 step test timed the same 1.78 kW
step both ways: about 18 s to settle going up, about 23 s coming back down. 23 s is the
one that belongs here, because the question this bound answers is *how long may the plant
still be the explanation*, and the safe answer is to keep believing the plant for as long
as the plant has ever been seen to take. At the measured 2 s meter tick that is
**12 cycles** (`control.py`, `SETTLE_CYCLES`).
⚠️ **The first version of this feature used 18 s, and 9 cycles was wrong in the direction
that accuses.** Nine cycles is three short of the plant's own down-ramp, so an ordinary
load step on a **single** inverter — the command falling through zero while the pack is
still coasting the old way — could produce `freeze-released` with nothing else on the bus
at all. Driven in the container against a model of the measured plant, one inverter and
no second writer anywhere: over 272 load-step pairs the 9-cycle bound produced a release
in 62 of them and the shipped 12-cycle bound in 2.
**Releasing the output freeze does not unfreeze the loop.** The *integrator* freeze is
untouched, so the command is free to move only as far as an accumulator that stopped
accumulating cycles ago, one slew step per cycle. Measured on the simulator at the live
install's shape (`max_w 5000`, `slew_w 400`, `target_grid_w -10`), with another writer
holding the pack at +700 W and 2 kW of export standing: the command holds at 0 W while
the counter climbs, starts on the **twelfth** saturated cycle, walks 0 → −400 → −800, and
settles at **−1190 W** against a frozen integrator of −1194 W — not at the 5000 W rail.
Before this change the same run held 0.0 W on every cycle, for as long as the other
writer stayed.
⚠️ **The site still does not reach its target in that state, and it is not supposed
to.** What the exit buys is that the battery stops being idle while the site exports;
what it does not buy is correct regulation against an actuator somebody else is also
writing to. A standing grid error with another writer on the bus is the symptom of a
configuration this add-on refuses to support, not a tuning problem.
#### What `freeze-released` in the action log actually tells you
**It says: the inverter's power did not match the command for longer than this plant has
ever been measured to take to settle.** That is all it says. It is a reason to go
looking; it is not a finding, and in particular it is **not** proof that a second writer
exists.
The test behind it compares the reading against **one cycle's** command, and the pack
carries more than one cycle of history. So our own power, arriving late, can look like
somebody else's:
- **A big, fast load step is the ordinary innocent cause.** The command falls through
zero while the pack is still coasting in the old direction, and for a few cycles the
reading has the sign the command *used* to have. Measured, one inverter, nothing else
on the bus: eight cycles after a +1990 W command the command was 0 and the pack still
read +522.3 W.
- **A plant slower than the one that was measured does it too.** The 12-cycle bound is
derived from a 23 s down-ramp. A colder or larger pack that takes longer than that will
produce releases on its own, and no constant read off the 2026-08-22 measurement can
prevent it. In the same container sweep, holding the bound at 12 and lengthening only
the plant's down-ramp, single-inverter releases went from 8 of 320 scenarios at the
measured 23 s to 59 of 320 at 34 s and 268 of 320 at 50 s.
**So, in order:** if you see `freeze-released` **once, during or just after a large load
or PV swing**, that is most likely the loop's own ramp and needs nothing. If you see it
**standing** — cycle after cycle, at a steady load, with a standing grid error the
battery is not correcting — then look for the second writer: another controller, a
scheduler in the inverter's own app, or an installer tool left connected. That is the
configuration §1.5 of the specification rules out, and it is the one this exit exists to
stop the loop stalling on forever.
⚠️ **No `saturation_cycles` you can set removes the block.** This file accepts 1-10, and
all of those are below the 12-cycle release bound, so the freeze always engages before
its own exit is due. (The first version of this feature had the bound at 9, where a
setting of 9 or 10 *did* silently delete the block; moving the bound to 12 closed that
by construction rather than by warning about it.)
#### Why `target_grid_w` is not zero
The deadband is a one-way ratchet: any resting point inside it holds until
something disturbs it. Import and export are **separate registers on the
meter**, so a rest point of +14 W is billed for every second it holds and no
amount of export cancels it - 14 W all day is 0.34 kWh.
Biasing the target below zero moves that residue into the export register,
which is not billed. The resting band becomes `target ± deadband`, so:
| `target_grid_w` | resting band | worst billed leak | export given away |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | -15 … +15 W | ~15 W (0.35 kWh/day) | none |
| **-10** | -25 … +5 W | ~5 W (0.12 kWh/day) | ~10 W |
| -15 | -30 … 0 W | none | ~15 W (0.36 kWh/day) |
Set it to `-deadband_w` if injection is worth nothing to you and you would
rather give the energy away than buy it back. Set it to `0` if you are paid
properly for export, or if you are debugging and want the loop centred.
⚠️ This is a **billing** knob, not a speed knob. If import is arriving in
bursts rather than as a trickle, the cause is tracking lag, and this will not
help - see "Why the tuning is what it is".
### Maintenance
| option | default | meaning |
|---|---|---|
| `maintenance_enabled` | false | Enable the monthly cycle |
| `maintenance_interval_days` | 28 | Minimum gap between cycles |
| `maintenance_start_hour` | 10 | Hour of day a due cycle begins |
| `maintenance_discharge_w` | 2000 | Drain rate (exports the surplus). Above `max_w` it is **clamped** to `max_w` — the drain phase SETs the setpoint and the arbiter bounds it, saying so on the status page (`limited by supervised(max_w)`). Warned about, not refused: the cycle still completes, just slower |
| `maintenance_charge_w` | 2000 | Charge ceiling, capped again by peak headroom. Must stay **at or below `max_w`** or the cheap-window shaping (`hi = -maintenance_charge_w`) contradicts the supervised limit (`lo = -max_w`), the arbiter resolves it to **0 W**, and maintenance silently never charges in a cheap window — **the add-on refuses to start** |
| `maintenance_soc_floor` | 11 | Drain target — stay just above the inverter's own floor. ⚠️ **This is not `peak_soc_floor`.** It is the depth the monthly recalibration deliberately goes to, once, on purpose; `peak_soc_floor` is the depth a money-saving discharge may never reach on any day. The right values differ (11 vs 20 as shipped), which is why they are two keys |
| `maintenance_soc_target` | 99 | Charge target |
| `maintenance_hold_min` | 120 | Hold at full so the BMS can balance |
### Tariff (all optional)
| option | meaning |
|---|---|
| `peak_forecast_entity` | Quarter-hour demand forecast, for capacity-tariff markets. Empty = no cap |
| `peak_cap_w` | The site's capacity-tariff target |
| `peak_soc_floor` (20) | **The percent below which the capacity-peak guard will not discharge the battery.** ⚠️ It bounds **the peak guard only** — it is **not a pack-wide reserve**, and ordinary self-consumption discharges straight past it (SAFETY-25, see below). Not optional and not the same thing as `maintenance_soc_floor` |
| `bms_soc_floor` (10) | The pack's **own** cut-out percent, the number the BMS enforces whatever you set above. `peak_soc_floor` must be **strictly above** it or the add-on refuses to start. ⚠️ **At a declared `inverters:` roster this key moves INTO each entry and is REQUIRED there** (SAFETY-32): it describes a battery, and two packs of different models have different cut-outs, so one number for both protects the shallower pack with the deeper pack's BMS. Nothing is inherited — an entry that omits it is refused **by name** at startup, and the flat key below is then not read at all |
| `price_now_entity`, `price_avg_entity` | Dynamic tariff. Empty = never force a paid grid top-up |
On a capacity-tariff site the maintenance charge is capped by the headroom left
under `peak_cap_w`, and if the forecast goes over the cap the charge-only clamp
is dropped so the battery can shave the peak instead. Money outranks the
maintenance schedule.
#### Capacity-tariff exposure of the grid-following loop
⚠️ **This section described the exposure BEFORE SAFETY-07. The loop is now
capped — see "The capacity-peak guard" below — and what follows is kept because it
is still the clearest statement of WHAT is being guarded and why the number is
worth what it is.**
⚠️ **`peak_cap_w` caps MAINTENANCE charging. It does not cap the loop.** The
grid-following loop is bounded by `max_w` and by the device rating, and by
nothing else. That is deliberate — the loop exists to *reduce* what crosses the
meter, so under every healthy condition it lowers the peak rather than raising
it — but it means one thing is true and worth writing down:
**If the meter lies, the loop will happily buy `max_w` from the grid for as long
as the lie lasts, and no cap in this add-on stops it.** A meter frozen at a large
export reads as "the house is exporting hard", the loop charges the battery to
correct it, and the correction is a grid import. At the schema maximum
`max_w: 5000` — which is what this house runs, and is also the device rating —
that is a 5 kW unattended import.
The bill is not the energy. In the Belgian capaciteitstarief the month is billed
on its highest quarter-hour average, so **fifteen minutes of this sets the whole
month's peak.** A measured case: one 4998 W quarter moved a monthly peak from
4832 W to 5013 W, and every day of that month was billed at the higher figure.
What exists today, and what does not:
| | |
|---|---|
| `max_w` bounds the magnitude | ✅ — but the exposure IS the magnitude |
| Maintenance charging capped under `peak_cap_w` | ✅ |
| **Loop capped under `peak_cap_w`** | ✅ — SAFETY-07, on every `meter_source` but `off` |
| Frozen meter detected | ✅ on `homewizard_local` only, **alarm only** |
| Frozen meter *stopped* | ✅ — SAFETY-07 forbids importing while the meter is frozen |
| SoC guard on the loop | ❌ — the BMS is the only energy backstop |
On the legacy `meter_source: off` path there are no P1 telegrams, so there is no
quarter-hour average to guard, and the status page says **NOT COVERED**. There
the mitigation is still operational: set `max_w` no higher than the loop actually
needs (the tuning was measured at 2000 W and a 1.78 kW load step is tracked fine
there), fit the e-stop, and watch for the alarm.
### The capacity-peak guard
**What it does.** Every cycle the add-on projects the open quarter to its
end-of-interval average — from P1 telegrams only, never from the command — and
compares it to a ceiling. Over the ceiling it files one claim: a **lower bound on
the setpoint**, at `P_PEAK`. That single shape is both behaviours §10.1 asks for:
a hard clamp on charging while the bound sits above the standing charge, and
pre-emptive discharge while it sits above zero. It can never cap discharge or
export, because a floor cannot.
**The number.** `excess = 900 × (projected − ceiling) ÷ seconds remaining`, and
the floor is the **measured** battery power plus that. The 900/remaining factor
is the design rather than an accident: it is 1.0 at the top of the quarter and
grows, so the guard is gentlest when its projection rests on the least evidence
and becomes aggressive only once the quarter is nearly measured.
**The ceiling** is `peak_cap_w`, raised to the month's banked peak when that
already stands higher — once a month's bill is set at 5013 W, holding later
quarters to 3500 W buys nothing and costs real charging. **That relaxation is
granted only by an OBSERVED reading:** a peak store that cannot be read leaves the
ceiling at the cap, so a broken instrument makes the guard stricter, never looser.
**When it cannot see, it forbids importing.** Three states are not evidence and
are checked before the projection is graded: no open quarter (a fresh averager
projects a confident 0 W, which is under every ceiling there is), a meter gap
longer than `meter_max_age_s`, and SAFETY-18's frozen-meter conjunction. In all
three the claim becomes a floor of **0 W**. That is the backstop for the frozen
meter: the alarm arrives at `meter_freeze_s` (300 s) of a 900 s billing quarter
and commands nothing, and this stops the import.
**It trips, where the freeze detector only notifies,** and the captures are why.
On the healthy reference day (2026-08-23) it engages on **zero** of 95 quarters.
The action is level-triggered and unlatched — re-derived from a fresh projection
every cycle, released the instant the projection drops back — so a false
engagement costs one cycle of discharge rather than a parked battery. And it is a
LIMIT, so every stop in the watchdog table still outranks it.
**Replayed on 2026-08-20**, the day the vendor controller failed: the billed
quarter measured **5029.8 W**, above the inverter's own 5000 W rating, and the
guard brings it to **3485 W** — under the soft limit, without ever asking for more
than the inverter can give. Across both committed days the quarters under the
limit go from 189/190 to 190/190. Two days is not thirty and does not close AC 3;
it is the comparison two days can support.
**What it alarms on is saturation, not engagement.** An engagement is an ordinary
control action and goes to the action log and the status page. A *saturated*
guard — asking for everything the inverter has while the quarter is still
projected over — raises one notification (`goodwe_peak_saturated`), because that
is the one state where the money will be spent and shedding load is the only
thing left that changes the bill.
**No new option for the CEILING.** It is `peak_cap_w`, which already shipped. The
coverage threshold is `meter_max_age_s`, the freeze predicate is
`meter_freeze_s`, and the achievable discharge comes from `max_w` and the device
rating — every one of them a key that already exists.
#### The energy floor under the forced discharge (`peak_soc_floor`)
The guard above can **command a discharge**, and until SAFETY-24 nothing in the
add-on bounded how far down it took the pack — the BMS was the only backstop.
On the 2026-08-20 replay the guard asks for **878 Wh in a day**.
That is not absurd: the BMS floor is real and it works. But it is *the pack's*
protection, not *yours*. A month of aggressive quarters can leave the battery
repeatedly parked at that cut-out with no record on this side of why, and the
first symptom — a battery that is never available when you want it — looks
exactly like the SoC drift the monthly maintenance cycle exists to correct.
- **`peak_soc_floor` (20 %)** is where the forced discharge stops. Below it the
guard files a **0 W** floor instead of a sized one: charging stays blocked
(that can only ever lower your offtake), and no further discharge is asked for.
- **⚠️ IT BOUNDS THE PEAK GUARD ONLY. IT IS NOT A PACK-WIDE RESERVE, AND THE NAME
READS LIKE ONE.** The ordinary self-consumption loop — the grid-following
control law that holds your meter at zero — has **no SoC floor of any kind**.
It will discharge straight past this number and keep going until the pack's own
BMS cut-out stops it. What you are promised by `peak_soc_floor: 20` is *"the
capacity-peak guard will not spend the pack for money below 20 %"*, and
**nothing more**. See below for what that costs on a real evening.
- **When it binds you are told**, once per episode, with notification
`goodwe_peak_soc_floor` and a status-page row reading `PEAK GUARD
FLOOR-LIMITED`: the quarter **will** go over the ceiling, so shedding load is
the only thing left that changes the bill. Failing to shave is never silent —
the euro figure is the whole point of the guard.
- **An unreadable SoC is treated as floor-limited, not as a full battery.** A
full battery is exactly the value that would disarm this floor.
- **`bms_soc_floor` (10 %)** is the pack's own cut-out — register `0x0560` on the
reference GW5000S-BP, consistent with DoD 90. It exists so the add-on can
**refuse to start** when `peak_soc_floor` is at or below it: such a floor can
never be the thing that stops the discharge, and a guard that advertises a
backstop it does not have is the one thing this project will not ship. Equal is
refused too — equal buys zero margin.
Why 20 %: the reference pack is 13.8 kWh usable, so 10 points of margin over the
BMS cut-out is about 1.6× the guard's worst measured day. If your pack is
smaller, or your quarters are worse, raise it.
#### ⚠️ What `peak_soc_floor` does **not** protect (SAFETY-25)
**On a sustained-load evening this add-on will take your battery to the BMS
cut-out, whatever `peak_soc_floor` says.** That is measured, not argued. Replayed
on the committed 2026-08-20 capture, 19:00–22:00 UTC — three hours of house load
after the sun has gone, 830 W average, not one watt of export in the window — with
the 13.8 kWh reference pack started at 21 %, one point above the shipped floor:
| | |
|---|---|
| pack at the start of the evening | **21 %** (one point above `peak_soc_floor`) |
| pack three hours later | **10.0 %** — the `bms_soc_floor` cut-out |
| energy the loop took out | **1525 Wh** |
| control cycles below `peak_soc_floor` | **549 of 587**, and **343** of those still delivering discharge |
| cycles on which the peak guard filed *any* floor | **0** |
| same replay at `peak_soc_floor` = 5, 11, 20, 60 | **the same 10.0 %, to four decimal places** |
That last row is the point: **this is a property of the control law, not a value
you can configure.** Raising `peak_soc_floor` to 60 % changes nothing at all,
because the guard it bounds is not the thing doing the discharging.
**And the two can happen in the same cycle.** On the high-load block of the same
day (15:00–17:00 UTC) with the pack below the floor, the guard reports
`PEAK GUARD FLOOR-LIMITED` — *"commanding no forced discharge"* — on 49 cycles,
and on **all 49 of them** the loop is simultaneously being granted a discharge of
up to 2000 W by the arbiter. The status page is telling you the truth about the
guard while the battery empties.
**Why it is built this way, and why SAFETY-24 could not fix it.** The peak guard
files a `lo` limit — a *lower* bound on the setpoint. That asymmetry is exactly
what makes the guard safe: it is provably incapable of lowering a target, capping
a discharge or contradicting the arbiter. The same property makes it incapable of
stopping a discharge the loop itself wants. A floor on the guard cannot become a
floor on the pack by being raised.
**Is this a runaway?** No. Self-consumption discharge is demand-driven and
self-limiting: it stops when the house stops drawing, and every watt of it is
serving load you would otherwise have imported. It is not SAFETY-18's frozen-meter
rail. What it means is that the *depth* your pack reaches on a heavy evening is
set by your house, not by any number in this file, and the BMS is the only thing
underneath it.
**This is now a recorded decision, not an open question.** On **2026-09-02** the
product owner took **Option A**: the BMS cut-out is **deliberately** the only
backstop for demand-driven discharge, and a loop-side reserve floor is
**deferred** rather than rejected. The options, their costs, the measured replay
and the reasoning are in
[`DECISIONS/SAFETY-25-loop-soc-floor.md`](DECISIONS/SAFETY-25-loop-soc-floor.md),
together with the revisit trigger (`ALLOC-01`, the host-side share allocator)
under which a reserve becomes safe to build. **Nothing about the behaviour above
changed** — Option A is what has always shipped. What changed is that this
section now describes a choice somebody made, and you can read why.
### The winding-loop alarm (the output clamp)
Every setpoint this add-on writes is clamped to `max_w` before it leaves the
process, and **when that clamp actually engages, it alarms.** The clamp on its
own is not the feature - this project already clipped, and the clipping is what
hid the defect the guard exists for: with the inverter switched off entirely an
unclamped integrator climbed ~130 W per 4 s past 10 kW and, pinned at the 5 kW
rail, reported **14 768 W**. Clipped silently, that is a flat, legal-looking
5000 W hold on every dashboard, and nothing anywhere says the loop asked for
three times it.
**What "the rating" is.** The bound is `max_w`, and only `max_w`. It is already
validated against the setpoint device's own range at startup - the add-on
*refuses to start* if `max_w` exceeds what the device accepts (and again once
ESPHome is up and the real rating is known), so by the time the loop runs the two
numbers agree. The device range is applied a second time inside the write as
defence in depth; after a successful validation it cannot bite, and if it ever
does, that engagement alarms too and names the bound.
**Clamping is not saturation, and the two never share a channel.**
| | what it means | what happens |
|---|---|---|
| **clamp** | the *computed* value exceeded the rating | a software bug signal - something upstream is winding. **Alarm.** |
| **saturation** | the inverter is not following a perfectly *legal* command | a hardware condition - freeze the integrator. **No alarm.** |
A loop can be legally saturated all day: a cold pack, a curtailed inverter, an
export limit. Routing the clamp through a saturation-shaped alarm puts the bug
signal inside the noise, which is the same silence as clipping quietly. They
share no reason code, no notification id, no status row and no counter.
**It is an alarm, not a trip.** The clamped value is written and the loop keeps
running - this is not the sign-disagreement failsafe, which commands 0 W. You
get a persistent notification (`goodwe_output_clamp`, replaced rather than
stacked), an `ERROR` in the log with the reason code `OUTPUT_CLAMP`, a row in
the event list, and a red status banner while it is engaged. Once it clears, a
warning row keeps the engagement count so the evidence does not vanish with the
condition. Consecutive engagements share one event row carrying the exact count,
because the event list keeps only 40 rows and a row per cycle would flush every
other guard's entries out of it.
**There is nothing to configure**, deliberately. The bound is `max_w`, which you
already set; giving the guard a limit of its own would be a second number that
can disagree with the first, which is exactly the failure the startup validation
exists to prevent. The alarm's cadence - first engagement, then re-asserted every
30 s while it persists, cleared after 3 clean cycles - is fixed for the same
reason `RAIL_FRAC` is: it describes the notification bus, not the plant.
WARNING: **on a default install the engagement you will see is the integrator's,
not the output's.** The control law bounds the integrator to `max_w` and *then*
derives the command from it, so the command itself can never come out over the
rating unless `integrator_max_w` has been deliberately raised above `max_w`.
Both are watched. A guard that watched only the emitted value would be silent on
every standard configuration.
### The frozen-meter alarm
A meter that has died is easy — it stops answering, the sample age climbs past
`meter_max_age_s`, the reading becomes missing, and the add-on and the ESP32 both
command 0 W. A meter that keeps answering `200 OK` with a document that never
changes is the hard one: **every freshness mechanism in the stack reads it as
healthy**, because it really is arriving on every poll. The loop then integrates
a constant error and winds to the rail, in 75–360 s at `max_w: 5000`.
The add-on alarms when **both** of these are true at once:
- the meter's own document (power figure *and* both kWh registers) has not
changed for `meter_freeze_s` — 300 s by default; **and**
- the command standing on the wire is at the rail, within 5 % of the ceiling
the command can actually reach.
**That ceiling is `min(max_w, the setpoint device's own rating)`, not `max_w`.**
The emitted command is clipped to the device's reported range as well as to
`max_w`, so on a 4700 W inverter configured with `max_w: 5000` a rail measured
at 4750 W is one the command can never stand at — the guard could not fire, and
the status page said `armed` anyway. It now measures the rail against the
smaller number and the page names it, saying *"below max_w because …"* when the
device is what capped it. (On an install that started, the two are equal: a
`max_w` above the device rating is refused at startup. This matters when the
rating could not be read at boot — see below.)
Neither half is usable alone. A bare "unchanged for N seconds" rule false-trips
at the exact operating point this controller aims for — at a converged −10 W a
1 Wh register legitimately takes about six minutes to move — and a bare "at the
rail" rule fires on any genuinely large load. Together they are safe in both
directions, because a real railed condition means kilowatts still crossing the
meter, and a kilowatt advances a 1 Wh register every 3.6 s.
**It is an alarm and nothing else.** It does not command 0 W, does not latch, and
does not claim the actuator. A false trip here parks the battery; a false
notification costs an alert. Turning it into a trip is a separate decision that
needs data from a real install — and an answer to "what should the loop do
instead", given that 0 W is itself an import of whatever the house is drawing.
When it fires you get a Home Assistant persistent notification
(`goodwe_meter_frozen`, replaced rather than stacked on a repeat), an `ERROR` in
the add-on log, an entry in the UI's event list, and a red banner on the status
page. **The loop keeps running.** If the meter really is stuck, stop control from
the add-on UI.
⚠️ **Only `meter_source: homewizard_local` is covered.** It is the only transport
that reads the meter's own document; on `ha_dsmr`, `mqtt_p1`, `ha_signed` and
`off` there is no signal to threshold and the status page says **NOT COVERED**
rather than pretending the guard is armed.
The same row appears for a second reason: a setpoint device that reports a range
from which no command magnitude is available in both directions leaves no rail
to measure at all, and a 0 W rail would be satisfied by *every* command. That is
reported as **NOT COVERED** too, and the detector stays silent rather than
degenerating into the bare "unchanged for N seconds" rule this design exists to
avoid.
| option | default | meaning |
|---|---|---|
| `meter_freeze_s` | 300 | Seconds of an unchanged measurement, *while the command is at the rail*, before the alarm |
Why 300 s: over 2399 s of this house at the converged operating point (mean grid
−14.2 W, 1194 polls, 735 of them repeating the previous reading) the largest
`unchanged_s` any sample sees is **8.0 s**, and the longest interval serving no
distinct reading at all is **15.4 s**. There is also a structural reason not to
lower it much: at 300 s the slowest a *healthy* register can tick and still look
unchanged is 12 W, which is inside the 15 W deadband — so the command there is
parked at 0 W and the two halves of the rule cannot both be true. At the schema
floor of 60 s that figure is 60 W and only the margin is left.
### The circulating-power alarm (SAFETY-31)
> **Only at two or more inverters.** At the shipped roster of one this quantity
> is identically zero for every reading, no claim is ever filed, and the status
> page says *n/a* rather than pretending to watch it.
Two inverters can move a great deal of energy while the meter reads almost
nothing. Inverter A charging at 3 kW while inverter B discharges at 3 kW nets
**~0 W at P1**: the site looks idle, and in reality the packs are being cycled
through two round-trip conversion losses continuously, for no benefit.
**Nothing else in this add-on can see it, and that is structural rather than an
oversight.** Every other guard is a consumer of the *net* figure at the grid
connection — the sign-disagreement failsafe gates on `abs(grid_w) > 300 W` and
that gate never opens at a netted zero; the capacity-peak guard and the tariff
both bill grid exchange. Circulating power is precisely the component of
per-inverter power that the sum destroys.
So the add-on computes a quantity none of them were computing:
```
circulating_w = Σ|Bᵢ| − |ΣBᵢ|
```
Zero when the units pull the same way. `2 × min(|B_a|, |B_b|)` when they oppose
— twice the power going round the loop, which is what both conversion stages are
processing between them. It is published as
`sensor.goodwe_circulating_power`, deliberately **beside** the grid figure:
*"grid 0 W, circulating 6000 W"* is the whole fault in two dashboard rows, and
no arithmetic on the grid figure alone can produce the second one.
**It is derived from each inverter's own measured power, not from what the
controller believed it commanded.** That matters because the allocator already
*refuses* to command opposite directions (ALLOC-01's sign-coherence gate), so a
figure computed from the allocation record would read zero by construction and
detect nothing. What this catches is circulation **nobody commanded** — a unit
ignoring or lagging its share, a stale share still being executed, or an
inverter doing something of its own accord.
| option | default | meaning |
|---|---|---|
| `circulation_w` | 700 | Watts of measured opposition below which nothing is reported |
| `circulation_hold_s` | 75 | Seconds it must stand there continuously before the trip |
**Why 700 W and 75 s, and why neither is a round number.** Both were read off
924 closed-loop runs on the two-master test rig in which *nothing* was faulty,
swept across the whole range the schema accepts for `gain` and `slew_w`. A
momentary opposition is **legitimate**: writes to the inverters are serialised,
so on a reversing cycle one unit gets its new number up to a control cycle
before its sibling, both slew through zero, and between the two crossings they
genuinely oppose. The worst *continuous* legitimate opposition, by threshold,
was **505 s at 100 W, 40 s at 250 W, 10 s at 300 W and 5.0 s — one control
cycle — at 400 W and above**. The knee is 400 W and it is the schema floor;
below it, ordinary operation would hold the sensor over the line for minutes and
no usable window could tell that from a fault. 700 W carries margin above the
knee because the second inverter's ramp and lag are not yet measured. 75 s is
15× the worst legitimate episode, 2.5× the firmware's own 30 s link-veto window,
and comfortably inside the 900 s quarter that bills the capacity tariff.
**What happens when it trips, and what it honestly cannot do.** The site is
commanded **0 W on every inverter** and latched there until you press start.
That is not aimed at making a misbehaving inverter stop — if a unit has stopped
listening, no command will reach it. It does two things that do not need its
cooperation: it removes *this controller* as one of the two participants in the
loop, and it makes anything still happening **visible at the meter** instead of
cancelled at it, where the ordinary guards can see it. **If the grid reading
does not move after the trip, one inverter is no longer listening and the
remaining actuator is a human at the isolator.**
**The alarm survives a Home Assistant restart.** The latch is written to `/data`
and the notification is re-raised on the first cycle after every start —
`persistent_notification` lives only in memory, and an alarm that vanishes with
a restart is how a real outage on this system went unseen for over six hours.
Restarting does **not** clear the trip; starting control from the add-on UI
does, and only after you have read why.
### Energy price providers
> **A fetched price moves energy only when you switch arbitrage on.** This
> release ships the five provider plugins, the canonical all-in format they
> emit, the config that selects one, and — new in OPT-04 — a price-arbitrage
> strategy that trades on them. With `arbitrage_enabled: false`, which is the
> shipped default, **selecting a provider is what starts the fetch**: the feed
> is read every 30 minutes, validated, and the day recorded in
> `/data/price_history.json`, which the *Price history* status row reports and
> the add-on log names at every refresh. No charging decision changes.
>
> ⚠️ **That has been the documented behaviour since OPT-04 and was not the
> actual behaviour until TARIFF-10.** The background refresh was started only
> when `arbitrage_enabled` was on — and it ships `false` — so an install with a
> provider configured fetched nothing at all, never created the store, and read
> *Price history: empty* for as long as it ran. If you configured a provider and saw an empty
> Price history row, that is what you were looking at. Trading is unchanged and
> is still `arbitrage_enabled` alone.
>
> `static_profile` below needs no network at all, so its cheap window is
> computed on every cycle and reaches the maintenance cycle's grid top-up
> whether or not arbitrage is armed. ⚠️ **And it is still the only source of
> that window.** A provider-backed plan now exists on every configured site,
> but *Cheap window* and the maintenance cycle's grid top-up read
> `static_profile` and nothing else — a deliberate limit, recorded with what it
> would take to change in `DECISIONS/TARIFF-10-fetching-is-not-trading.md`.
| option | meaning |
|---|---|
| `price_provider` | `off` (default) or one of the five plugins below |
| `price_markup_eur_kwh` | Your supplier's margin, EUR/kWh. **Added only when the chosen plugin's feed does not already contain it** |
| `price_taxes_eur_kwh` | Levies and VAT, EUR/kWh. Same rule |
| `export_price_eur_kwh` | The **injection** price. A separate scalar, not a series — see below |
| `price_csv_path` | Where `manual_csv` reads its file |
| `price_feed_url` | Override the plugin's default feed. Used **exactly as written** — the add-on appends nothing to it, including the date range, so an override gets whatever horizon that URL returns. Only a host the plugin itself declares is accepted |
| `price_horizon_h` | How far ahead to ask for, hours |
| `price_timeout_s` | Per-request timeout |
| `static_profile` | A static day/night or fully-fixed tariff. Empty by default — see below |
**Which plugin sources what.** This is the one thing to get right, because
adding your markup to a price that already contains it makes every future
arbitrage decision wrong by that amount, in a direction nothing reports.
| plugin | product | the published figure contains | the add-on adds |
|---|---|---|---|
| `generic_dayahead` | day-ahead | energy only (wholesale EPEX BE) | markup **and** taxes |
| `engie_dynamic` | day-ahead | energy + Engie's markup | taxes |
| `totalenergies_dynamic` | day-ahead | energy + TotalEnergies' markup | taxes |
| `eneco_eddy` | **real-time / imbalance** | everything, all-in | nothing |
| `manual_csv` | day-ahead | everything, all-in | nothing |
You cannot get this wrong by editing the markup: each plugin *declares* what its
feed contains and the add-on adds only the rest. Set a markup under a plugin
that already carries one and it is **ignored, with a line in the log saying so**
— never applied twice.
That holds **given a correct declaration**, and it is worth knowing where the
line is. What the add-on enforces mechanically is that a plugin cannot obtain
the markup or apply it: the numbers are not reachable from plugin code, and a
plugin whose code mentions them fails to load at all. What it cannot check is
whether a plugin described its supplier's feed truthfully — that is a claim
about somebody else's tariff, and no code can verify it. If you write a plugin,
the `sources` declaration is the part a reviewer has to read.
`eneco_eddy` is a real-time/imbalance product rather than a day-ahead one. It is
flagged as high-volatility, which widens arbitrage thresholds once the
optimiser lands. That comes from the plugin's own declaration, not from its
name.
**`generic_dayahead` and the shape of the public feed.** It reads Fraunhofer
ISE's Energy-Charts API (`https://api.energy-charts.info/price?bzn=BE`, no key
and no registration), which publishes a *columnar* document — parallel
`unix_seconds` and `price` arrays, in EUR/MWh, with the unit and the licence
stated in the response. Two things follow that are worth knowing before you
point `price_feed_url` somewhere else:
* The timestamps are **UTC instants**. They are rendered at the Brussels offset
that applies to each one, so the hour that happens twice every October is two
points rather than one overwritten one.
* Belgium moved to a **15-minute market time unit** on 2025-10-01, and the feed
followed. A published day is **96 points, not 24**. Nothing in the add-on
assumes either spacing, and nothing aggregates the quarters away.
* The request **names the days it wants**, derived from the horizon on the
**Brussels** calendar — `?bzn=BE&start=2026-09-09&end=2026-09-10`, two
inclusive local dates. Without that the feed answers a single day, and
everything past today would be carried forward from yesterday's profile and
flagged provisional — which §8.3 excludes from arbitrage, so tomorrow would
never be tradeable at any hour. The calendar is Brussels rather than UTC
because 22:30 UTC in summer is already tomorrow in Belgium.
**What you get before the auction publishes.** The day-ahead auction clears at
about 13:00–14:00 CET. Ask for tomorrow before that and the feed returns fewer
days than requested — that is normal, not a failure. The add-on keeps the
series of what exists and fills the remaining hours from yesterday's profile,
flagged provisional; arbitrage runs on the firm hours and ignores the flagged
ones. So a dynamic site's plan is part firm and part carried every morning and
fully firm once tomorrow is published, and neither state is an error.
⚠️ **If you set `price_feed_url`, you keep the short horizon.** The override is
sent exactly as you wrote it and the add-on adds no `start`/`end` to it, because
those are this feed's parameter names and an override may point somewhere with
different ones — rewriting a URL you typed is how a request nobody intended gets
made. The consequence is a **`WARNING` in the log on every price refresh**,
naming the range that would otherwise have been requested. If you only wanted a
different host and not a different horizon, the fix is to clear the option.
If the arrays ever come back different lengths, or the unit stops saying
EUR/MWh, the fetch is refused outright rather than trusted in part: a price
series missing its last hours is a series missing the evening peak, and it
would be traded on as though it were complete. A refused fetch is the §11.4
row — static profile, provisional plan, no arbitrage — and the reason is in the
log.
**`manual_csv` — the offline fallback.** It needs no internet, no supplier
account and no HTTP stack at all, and it is the supported way to run this
add-on price-aware on a site with no outbound connectivity. Write a file and
point `price_csv_path` at it:
```csv
start,eur_per_kwh,provisional
2026-01-15T00:00:00+01:00,0.1834,false
2026-01-15T01:00:00+01:00,-0.0210,true
2026-01-15T02:00:00+01:00,0.3115,false
```
- `start` **must carry its UTC offset** (`+01:00` in winter, `+02:00` in
summer). A bare `2026-01-15 00:00` is refused, because for one hour every
October a local wall clock names two different moments.
- `eur_per_kwh` is **all-in** — energy *plus* markup *plus* taxes. This plugin
has no way to know what your numbers already include, so it assumes
everything and adds nothing.
- Negative prices are valid and are kept. They are the best charging hours of
the year.
- `provisional` is optional; omit the column and every hour is treated as
settled.
**When there are no prices at all** — provider off, feed unreachable, CSV
missing — the add-on does not guess. It reports *no price data*, which is a
distinct state from "prices, all of them zero": the plan is marked provisional
and arbitrage is disabled, per the degradation matrix. It never falls back to a
price of zero, which would read as free electricity.
#### The hours the feed has not published yet (FCST-04)
A day-ahead auction publishes tomorrow's prices once a day, at **14–16 h CET**.
Before that, the feed is serving today and nothing else — so a `price_horizon_h`
of 48 asks for 48 hours and gets back the ten or fifteen that are left in the
day. Until FCST-04 those other hours were simply **absent** from the plan: not
priced badly, not flagged, just missing, and nothing said so.
Now the add-on keeps the **published prices of the last few days** in
`/data/price_history.json` and fills an unpublished hour of the horizon with
yesterday's price for the same Brussels wall-clock hour, flagged
`provisional: true`. Two things follow, and the second one matters more:
- **The plan says it is guessing** — `provisional: true` on every carried hour,
which is what the optimiser reads. Before, a half-length plan looked
completely settled.
- **Nothing may trade on a carried hour.** §8.3 forbids acting on a provisional
price, so arbitrage drops those hours from the trade set entirely — it needs a
buy hour and a sell hour that were *both* published. Carrying a price forward
widens what the optimiser can **see**; it never widens what it may **do**.
**"An unpublished hour", not "every unpublished hour"** — the fill can only
carry an hour yesterday actually published. If yesterday's record is itself
partial (a first day, an outage, a feed that only ever serves the rest of the
day), the local hours it never held are **left out of the series**: §11.4
applies to those hours, and asking the plan for one raises rather than
answering. An hour with no price is not a free hour, and the fill does not
invent a neighbour, a mean or a zero for it.
**A quarter-hourly feed keeps all four of its prints.** `eneco_eddy` settles
per quarter, and the fill decides *which whole hours need carrying* — never what
a published hour may contain. Every point the provider published inside the
horizon is passed through untouched; a carried point is added only for a whole
hour the feed did not print at all.
**What you can actually see on the status page.** *Price history* (below) says
what is held. *Arbitrage* carries the strategy's own sentence, which names the
firm/provisional split whenever that split is what refused a trade. *Tariff*
does **not** report the fill: it is the static-profile or Home Assistant
price-entity sentence, regenerated on the 30 s tick. The provider plan's own
line — `dynamic_dayahead from generic_dayahead, 48 h, provisional` — goes to the
**add-on log** at every refresh, alongside `§8.3: 33 of 48 hours carried forward
from yesterday's profile and flagged provisional; 15 published`.
The plan is also now cut to the horizon you asked for, which means **hours that
have already elapsed are no longer in it**. That is a real change to arbitrage:
a cheap night that has already gone used to sit in the series as the cheapest
hour of the day, and a cycle can never buy in an hour that is past — so the
trade was quietly never taken. The spread is now taken over hours still ahead.
A new status row, **Price history**, says which days are held, how many price
points each holds and how many whole hours those cover — `2026-01-13 (96 points
over 24 h)`. ⚠️ **Those are two different numbers and the row used to print one
of them under the other's name**: it counted points and labelled them `h`, so a
quarter-hourly feed read `96 h` for a 24-hour day. The figure that says whether
tomorrow morning's fill has a whole day to carry is the **hour** one. If it
reads `empty` or `unavailable`, nothing is carried, the horizon
is as short as the feed makes it, and every other guarantee is unchanged — a
cache that cannot answer is not allowed to be a controller that cannot regulate.
The store is rebuilt by the next successful fetch; on a brand-new install the
first fill is possible the day after the first refresh.
The same applies to a file that is *partly* broken: a day record this build
cannot read is dropped, the row says how many were dropped and why, and the rest
of the file still loads. And a store that **cannot persist records nothing** —
not even in memory. That covers a missing `/data`, and it also covers a `/data`
that is there and cannot be **written**: a full volume, a read-only remount. An
in-memory yesterday would answer for one run and vanish on the next restart,
which is a cache that forgets without saying so; the row naming the reason and
*no prices carried* are the honest pair.
⚠️ **What a failed write does not do is throw away what is already in the
file.** A volume that fills at 14:00 leaves the yesterday written at 13:30 still
answering, because that record survives a restart — the store stops *adding* to
it, nothing more. And it never stops the add-on: a write that cannot complete is
logged and reported on the status row, never raised. A cache that cannot answer
is not allowed to be a controller that cannot regulate, and that applies to the
volume being full exactly as it applies to the volume being absent.
**Injection is priced separately** (`export_price_eur_kwh`). In Belgium it is
often near zero, which by itself strongly favours self-consumption over export.
It is a single number rather than a curve because no supported supplier
publishes a dynamic injection tariff; negative values are accepted.
**The old Home Assistant price sensors.** `price_now_entity` and
`price_avg_entity` still work and are unchanged: the add-on compares them and
uses the result as a cheap-window hint for the maintenance charge. They are
**not compatible with `price_provider`, and not with `static_profile` either**
— configure two of them and the add-on refuses to start, naming the conflict,
because the add-on reads exactly one and the loser is silent. Use one.
### Static day/night and fully-fixed tariffs (`static_profile`)
Most Belgian households are **not** on a dynamic contract, and an EMS that only
works under hourly pricing is an EMS for a minority. `static_profile` is how a
two-period day/night tariff or a single fixed price becomes a first-class
configuration rather than "turn the price feature off and hope".
It is one option, holding a JSON object, on one line:
```json
{"periods": [
{"name":"day", "from":"07:00","to":"22:00","days":"mon-fri","eur_per_kwh":0.34},
{"name":"night", "from":"22:00","to":"07:00","days":"mon-fri","eur_per_kwh":0.26},
{"name":"night", "from":"00:00","to":"24:00","days":"sat,sun", "eur_per_kwh":0.26}]}
```
A **fully fixed** tariff is one period covering the whole week:
```json
{"periods": [
{"name":"fixed","from":"00:00","to":"24:00","days":"all","eur_per_kwh":0.31}]}
```
- `eur_per_kwh` is **all-in** — energy *plus* your supplier's markup *plus*
taxes — exactly like `manual_csv`. `price_markup_eur_kwh` and
`price_taxes_eur_kwh` are **not** added to it.
- `days` takes `mon`…`sun`, ranges (`mon-fri`, `fri-mon`), comma lists
(`sat,sun`) and the words `weekday`, `weekend`, `all`.
- Times are **local Belgian time** and windows are half-open: `07:00`–`22:00`
includes 07:00 and excludes 22:00. A window may cross midnight.
- The clock changes twice a year and the add-on handles it. It generates prices
against absolute instants, so a spring-forward day is 23 hours and an
autumn-back day is 25.
> ⚠️ **A window belongs to the day the clock reads, not the day it started.**
> `22:00`–`07:00` on `mon-fri` covers Friday 23:00 but **not** Saturday 03:00 —
> Saturday 03:00 is Saturday's. That is why the example above has a third row
> for the weekend. Leave it out and the add-on **refuses to start**, naming the
> uncovered hours.
**Every day type must be covered exactly once.** The periods have to tile all
seven days with no gap and no overlap, and the add-on checks that at startup. A
gap is refused rather than filled in, because a made-up price is one the
optimiser would trade on; an overlap is refused because otherwise one of the two
prices silently wins on the order you typed them in.
**What it changes today.** The add-on works out which window you are in and
whether that window is *cheap* — strictly below the tariff's seven-day average.
The Web UI shows both on a new **Tariff** row, and the maintenance cycle's
cheap-window grid top-up uses it, which is exactly the "shift load into the
cheap window" behaviour a day/night tariff asks for. Nothing else moves energy
on a price yet.
Under a **fully fixed** tariff every hour equals the average, so there is *no*
cheap window by construction and the add-on runs self-consumption only — which
is the correct behaviour for that product, not a limitation. Peak shaving, the
capacity-tariff tracker, the reserve floor and the maintenance schedule are all
unaffected: the capacity tariff is a network cost charged whatever your energy
contract is.
**Recommended even on a dynamic contract.** When a price feed is unreachable the
add-on falls back to your static profile, marks the plan provisional and
disables arbitrage. With `static_profile` empty there is nothing to fall back
to, and the site simply has no tariff until the feed returns. It is not required
— the add-on warns rather than refusing — but filling it in is what makes that
fallback work.
### Price arbitrage (`arbitrage_enabled`)
§10.1 priority 3: charge in the cheapest published hour, discharge in the
dearest, **and only when the spread covers what the round trip costs.** Off by
default — this is the first strategy in the add-on that commands the battery
*against* the meter on purpose, so it is armed deliberately or not at all.
| option | meaning |
|---|---|
| `arbitrage_enabled` | `false` by default. Arms the strategy |
| `cycle_cost_threshold_eur` | What one full round trip costs per kWh — pack wear plus conversion losses. A spread below this is not traded |
| `arbitrage_soc_floor` | The reserve arbitrage may not spend, % |
| `arbitrage_soc_ceiling` | The headroom it may not overfill, % |
**What it needs, and what the add-on refuses.** Arbitrage requires a price
source (`price_provider` or `static_profile`) and a P1 meter (`meter_source`).
Without a price source there is nothing to tell cheap from expensive; without
P1 the capacity-tariff peak guard never runs, and §9.1 puts peak shaving above
arbitrage — a charge that nothing measures is exactly what that guard exists to
prevent. Both combinations are **refused at startup** rather than left looking
armed.
**Peak shaving always wins.** The strategy cannot obtain a spread at all
without first answering whether the peak guard is holding, and even if it
could, the guard's floor is filed at a higher arbiter priority and clamps an
arbitrage charge. Discharging is never capped by it — only offtake is billed.
**It never exports into a negative price** (§17). A negative hour is the best
possible hour to *charge* in and that is still allowed; selling into one gives
energy away and pays for the privilege.
**At the shipped threshold a static day/night site does not trade.** The
realistic Belgian day/night spread is about 0.08 EUR/kWh and the default
threshold is 0.10, so the honest answer on such a site is "no opportunity", and
the status page says so with the numbers. Whether 0.10 is the right default is
a product decision, not a bug: lower it only if you know what a cycle costs
your pack.
**The prices are fetched in the background**, never on the control tick — a
supplier's TLS timeout on that path would be a supplier able to push the add-on
towards the firmware's 30 s failsafe. The plan refreshes every 30 minutes and
retires itself if the refresh stops answering, at which point arbitrage stops
with it.
⚠️ **That refresh is not gated on this switch** (TARIFF-10). It runs when a
`price_provider` is configured *or* when arbitrage is armed, so turning
arbitrage off does not turn the price feed off — and a site with no provider
that arms arbitrage on a `static_profile` keeps the plan it has always had. The
only thing that decides whether a request leaves the machine is
`price_provider`: with it `off`, the refresh resolves the static profile in
memory and opens no connection.
### Site
| option | meaning |
|---|---|
| `estop_fitted` | Whether the RS485 e-stop is installed. Drives the warning banner |
| `log_level` | `trace`/`debug`/`info`/`warning`/`error` |
## The Web UI
The ingress panel shows live values, why the controller is commanding what it
is, and a **Commissioning** checklist that names any problem in words. It also
carries the three buttons: start/stop control, force a maintenance cycle, and
abort one.
Since **UX-02** it has a second page, **Configuration** — see *There are TWO
places to configure this add-on*, above. ⚠️ **It adds nothing you can do to the
inverter.** The configuration page reads and writes the add-on's own settings
and can restart the add-on; the set of commands that reach the hardware is
exactly the three buttons it always had.
## Status entities
If an MQTT broker is available the add-on publishes setpoint, grid power,
battery power, circulating power, state of charge, maintenance phase and
controller status by MQTT discovery. This is observability only — the controller works fine without a
broker, and MQTT problems can never affect control.
## Before you commission inverter B: `tools/rehearse_roster.py` (ARCH-02)
The day the `inverters:` roster is declared, two things change that are
**one-way on a live box and invisible until after the restart that applies
them**: the store migration renames the keys that hold the SAFETY-02 latch and
the maintenance history, and the entity ids Home Assistant composes change
shape. This tool runs the **real `Controller`** through that transition against
a **copy** of the state file and reports the difference.
docker run --rm -e PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE=1 -v <repo>:/w:ro \
goodwe-addon-checks:1 sh -c 'cd /w/goodwe_controller && \
python3 tools/rehearse_roster.py \
--state /w/state-copy.json \
--before /w/live-options.json \
--after /w/roster-options.json \
--live-entities /w/live-entities.txt \
--reverse --round-trip'
Exit `0` clean · `1` at least one finding · `2` could not run. ⚠️ **`2` is not a
pass.**
### The owner steps, because this session could not take them
⚠️ **The rehearsal is only as good as the state it is pointed at, and nothing in
this repository can fetch that.** SSH to the live box is blocked by policy and
that is correct — `/data/state.json` is the file the running add-on is writing.
So three things have to be exported by hand, onto the machine that runs the
check, **before** the roster is declared:
1. **The state file.** From the Supervisor host:
ha addons info local_goodwe_controller # confirm the slug first
docker cp addon_local_goodwe_controller:/data/state.json ./state-copy.json
or take it out of a full add-on backup, which is the same bytes. ⚠️ **Copy
it, never move it, and never write to the original.** The tool opens the path
it is given exactly once and does all of its writing on a scratch copy — but
the safe habit is to hand it a file the add-on has never heard of.
2. **The options blob**, as `--before`. It is not reachable through the Home
Assistant REST API and no entity carries it; export it from the Supervisor,
the same way `tools/predeploy_check.py` needs it. Write the roster you intend
to deploy into a second file and pass it as `--after`.
3. **The entity list**, as `--live-entities` — one entity id per line:
Developer tools -> Template:
{{ states | map(attribute='entity_id') | select('search','goodwe') | join('\n') }}
⚠️ **Omitting it is a REFUSAL (exit 2), not a quieter run.** The orphan check
is graded against the ids the install actually has, and without that file it
is not graded against reality at all — so the tool will not run rather than
hand back a clean bill of health for a half of the transition it did not
check. If you genuinely have to run without it, pass `--no-live-entities`:
the run then carries a standing banner in the report header **and** on the
exit line saying the orphan check was not graded. The asymmetry used to be
the other way round — an unreadable file refused, a missing flag passed with
exit 0 and no disclosure at all — and the owner runs this once, at
commissioning, under time pressure.
The install carries roughly 49 `goodwe*` entities and this add-on announces
eight of them. The tool separates the ids it owns from the ids it does not,
rather than claiming orphans it cannot cause.
### The reference, which is loaded on every run
`--reference` defaults to `tools/rehearsal/announced-reference.txt` and is read
**whether or not** you pass an entity list. It records what the build is
supposed to announce, three columns per row:
<entity_id> <unique_id> <device identifier>
⚠️ **All three, and the second and third are the ones an entity_id-only list
cannot see.** The tool's own before/after diff is composed twice by the same
build, so a change to the composition moves both sides equally and the diff
reports nothing. Worse, two changes orphan an install *without moving a single
composed entity_id*: renaming `mqtt.BASE` (every `unique_id` changes) and
changing `DEVICE["identifiers"]` (HA sees a new device). Home Assistant keys its
entity registry on `unique_id` and its device registry on the identifier, so
either one creates a **new** entity beside the old — and because discovery is
published `retain=True` with no removal payload, the old config stays on the
broker and the old entity stays in the registry, still named by every automation
that referenced it, never updating again. Both were measured coming back
**exit 0** before the reference carried three columns.
`object_id` is deliberately **not** a column: `app/mqtt.py` records that HA
2026.8 does not honour it in a discovery payload, so renaming one is a true
no-op, and `test_rehearse.py` requires that mutation to **survive** — otherwise
"the reference notices any edit to `mqtt.py`" would be indistinguishable from
"the reference notices what HA keys on".
⚠️ **No result in this repository was produced against real state.** Everything
recorded here and in `test_rehearse.py` was measured on the synthetic fixtures
in `tools/rehearsal/`.
### What it confirms on the synthetic fixtures
⚠️ **This is a SECOND INSTRUMENT reaching a conclusion this repository already
holds, not a discovery.** `test_maintenance.py` section 13 — *"RECORDED, NOT
FIXED: SAFETY-02's migration has the same wrong-namespace hole, and it is a
LATCH"* — already states it, already names `namespaced_latched`, and already
carries the sentence *"the guard is defeated by the very key the defect wrote"*.
That file is on `release/1.0` and this card does not touch it. What is new here
is that the finding is now reachable **from a state file the owner supplies**
rather than only from a fixture built in a test, and that it is reached by a
different route: a full `Controller` start diffed against its predecessor,
rather than assertions over a `MemStore`. Two instruments, one answer.
**The finding.** A pre-DEV-02 flat store that declares a multi-inverter roster
comes up with its SAFETY-02 latch **DISARMED**, unless the first roster entry
happens to be named `inverter-a`. `Controller.__init__` calls
`migrate_unit_keys(store, UNIT_A)` with a hardcoded constant, so the latch lands
in `unit/inverter-a/sign_tripped`; a roster of `["garage", "shed"]` reads
`unit/garage/sign_tripped`, which is absent. And `_grade_store_migration()` —
the guard written for exactly this — sees the migration's own misdirected key
satisfy its `namespaced_latched` test and returns without re-arming. The file
says `sign_tripped: true`, the banner is green, and nothing is held at 0 W.
**Both routes reach it, and they are NOT the same defect.** The rehearsal
reports them as separate legs because they need separate fixes:
| leg | how it gets there |
|---|---|
| `SAME-STEP` | the roster is declared in the same step as the upgrade. The migration runs, and is handed `UNIT_A`. |
| `STAGED` | the flat config runs once under 0.7.0+ first. That start stamps `schema_version = 1`, so the roster start's migration takes its `from_version >= SCHEMA_VERSION` early return and **the latch never moves at all**. |
⚠️ **So "hand `migrate_unit_keys()` the roster's own first name" is NOT the
whole fix, and the rehearsal measures that rather than asserting it.**
`test_rehearse.py` part 5b builds exactly that change and reports:
LEG STAGED: DISARMED
LEG SAME-STEP: clean
The staged path never reaches the line that was changed. A fix that stops there
closes the half an operator is least likely to take and leaves the half that
"upgrade first, declare the roster later" produces. The guard side —
`namespaced_latched` counting a namespace that is not on the roster — is what
covers both, and a change there turns every SAFETY-44 check in part 5 red, which
is what a fix should do to a pin that specifies a defect.
The fix belongs to its own card, shown red first. Part 5 pins the current
behaviour as a requirement so it cannot drift green by accident.
### The reverse direction: the retreat is supported, the round trip is not
If commissioning B goes wrong, **backing out to the flat single-inverter config
is supported and does not corrupt state.** Measured on the fixtures:
* the SAFETY-02 latch and the first pack's maintenance history both survive,
because `store.py` rule 2 keeps the flat spellings **live** rather than merely
present — `maintenance.UnitHistory.mirror_flat` writes them on every change,
so a single-FSM add-on finds a current history rather than one dated the day
the roster was declared;
* **it orphans eight Home Assistant entities** — the four per-unit rows for each
of the two units. **Measured:** the add-on stops announcing them and stops
publishing their state, so their history gaps and any automation whose
trigger names them stops firing, silently and without an error.
⚠️ **What is NOT measured, and was previously overstated here:** whether
advancing again restores them. An earlier draft of this section said the
orphaning was "not recoverable by advancing again: HA keeps the id it composed
at first discovery" — that reasoning cuts the other way, since keeping the
composed id is precisely what would let a re-advertised entity land back on
it, and discovery is published `retain=True` with no removal payload. Nothing
in this repository has tested a re-advance against a real Home Assistant, so
the claim is withdrawn rather than restated in the other direction. Plan the
retreat around the measured part: **the eight rows stop updating for as long
as you are retreated.**
⚠️ **What is NOT supported is the round trip.** A maintenance cycle that
completes *while the install is rolled back* is **discarded** when it
re-advances: `maint_schema_version` is already stamped, so `migrate_maint_keys()`
takes its early return and the pack reads the namespaced history from before the
retreat. The pack is then recalibrated on a schedule that does not know it
already was. **So: retreat freely, but treat a retreat as ending the current
maintenance bookkeeping — and if a cycle ran during it, correct
`unit/<first>/last_completed` by hand before advancing again.** This is a stated
decision, not a discovery made at the inverter.
## Before you deploy: `tools/predeploy_check.py` (PKG-09)
Two ways a deploy has gone wrong on this system, both of which the Supervisor
reports as success:
**The silent no-op.** The Supervisor keys the built image by `version:` in
`config.yaml`. `ha apps update` against an unchanged version installs nothing
and says it worked. This happened twice: PKG-06 (six merges behind an unbumped
version) and PKG-07 (six again). Both times a human noticed. Nothing else would have.
**The refused config.** A config the shipped validator rejects is
`SystemExit(78)` — the add-on does not start. ⚠️ **And the ingress panel goes
with it**, because the add-on serving it is not running, so recovery means the
Supervisor UI. SAFETY-39's rule 10 made this reachable from a config that
started fine on the previous version: 0.7.0's own default `slew_w: 1000`
exceeds the 555.6 W ceiling on a 5000 W rail.
Run it inside the container, so the validator half actually runs:
docker run --rm -v <repo>:/w:ro goodwe-addon-checks:1 \
python3 /w/goodwe_controller/tools/predeploy_check.py \
--deployed-version 0.7.0 --options /w/live-options.json
Export `live-options.json` from the Supervisor first — the options blob is not
reachable through the Home Assistant REST API, and no entity carries it.
**Exit codes.** `0` cleared · `1` REFUSED, do not deploy · `2` NOT CLEARED,
meaning a check did not run. ⚠️ **2 is not a pass.** On a bare host without the
add-on's dependencies the validator half skips and returns 2 rather than
pretending; `test_version_gate.py` pins that a skipped check can never exit 0,
because the first draft of that test reported four silent skips as passes.
⚠️ **Why this is not a CI check.** The obvious gate — "a pull request touching
runtime code must bump the version" — is the wrong shape here. This project
deliberately batches many merges into one deploy, so a per-PR bump would put
every branch in conflict over one line and still not prevent the failure, which
happens at deploy and not at merge. The check belongs where the mistake is made.
⚠️ This file's own change does **not** need a version bump, and the gate agrees:
`tools/` and `test_*.py` are not in its runtime set, because demanding a bump
for a typo fix trains people to bump without reading — the habit the check
exists to prevent.