Hi!
What I* have:
- a Raspberry Pi 3B
- a solar PV system with Modbus output
- a heat pump with Modbus output
What I want:
- energy stats of the PV and the heat pump, going back for a few years, without needing cloud access
- trigger the heat pump into overdrive when there's excess solar
- something that works well on a RPi 3B
- usable phone frontend (not necessarily an app, but kinda like it)
What I tried: Home Assistant -- which works but is very complicated and behaves rather funkily on the hardware. I suspect that putting a whole bunch of Docker containers on a lowly RPi is kind of a bad idea. But also, with Home Assistant, there appears to be a rather steep learning curve because there's just so much stuff.
What I've superficially considered but haven't tried: OpenHAB. Would be interested in learning if that's better.
(* actually none of these are mine, but for the purposes of this post, let's assume I have control of all this stuff.)
Strange. I've been running haos for some years on a 3b+ which is different but the soc is the same (although slightly higher clock) as is the amount of ram.
As said, I run haos though, not containers. Not sure how you tried it.
Just slap it on a SD card and go.. Mostly intuitive.
https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/raspberrypi/
I don't know about integrating your pv though. I am lucky with Enphase, although that has some downsides besides generally working.
HAOS installed sucessfully. But it does seems slow, even with basically nothing running on it but HACS, the SSH addon, and the file editor. And yeah, I think it's a 3B+ here too. From what I've seen in terms of recommendations, you should use at least use a RPi 4 or a NUC though.
As to containerization: Afaiu, all versions of Home Assistant are containerized which automatically makes them heavier than they'd need to be. The difference between HAOS and container Home Assistant is that HAOS is a full Linux distro with multiple Docker containers preinstalled on it, whereas with the containerized Home Assistant you set up your own OS and then run those same Docker containers on it (or perhaps it's just one Docker container, haven't tried that).
As to the integrations, both devices have Modbus and there are (plugins? integrations?) for them, so I am hopeful there, although I haven't figured it all out yet.
Never looked in to deeply how haos manages things.
I never used hacs since I've heard it complicates setups and maintenance and I don't want to put in more effort than I absolutely have to (working as it pro and don't need that privately). Running several integrations, Enphase as stated, airthings, broadlink, esphome, homekit, melcloud, nanoleaf and the main one for me, zigbee.
Speed when booted is perfectly fine, can't say otherwise.
What specifically is slow? Oh wait you said funkily, I interpreted slow. (edit: no wait you said it later lol) Anyhow, there's the modbus integration though I assume it's just the basic interface to your pv and you'd need to put in the effort to get data yourself or something. Don't know modbus.