We have solar panels on the house, and their energy production is managed by an Enphase Envoy microinverter system. I love data, so I wanted to build my own dashboard of energy consumption and production, which took me down a rabbit hole of dealing with Enphase’s shitty API.

Since then, I discovered that the Envoy system does, in fact, serve its energy data locally, so this is my brief explanation of how I moved over to that approach instead.

As astute readers are aware, I’ve been on a host my own stuff kick for some time now. I brought my music local with Navidrome, I moved my remaining websites off of that-shape-named-service into static sites that I host myself, and I just moved from Samsung SmartThings to Home Assistant for all my home automation stuff.

A recent household budget discussion wandered into the territory of replacing our Spotify family plan, and my wife’s position on it revealed what I think is one of the crucial points about hosting your own systems: owning your stuff.

This is absolutely an Emacs apologist blog, and I’m writing this post in Emacs right now. But I started at a new job recently and most of us use Visual Studio Code, and I know that’s considered a slur in many free software circles, but I’m here to tell you, “It’s OK.”

Loyal readers of the blog know that I’m a really big fan of MyNoise, the ultimate immersive soundscape tool created and maintained by the one and only Dr. Ir. Stéphane Pigeon. I use it when music gets too “demanding” or is creating a mood that distracts me from what I’m doing.

There have been some changes on MyNoise, and I created a few new unique soundscapes, and I want to share it all with you!

I recently had rooftop solar installed, and my system uses what are called “microinverters” made by the company Enphase. I’m going to make the brash assumption that because you are here, reading this article, titled such as it is, that you have at least a passing knowledge of what the hell I’m talking about. If anything is unclear, feel free to leave a comment!

Anyway, I wanted to get my solar power data into a local system, and was excited to learn that Enphase does have an API! Unfortunately, it has some issues. Allow me to explain them all in tedious detail!