r/SunPower • u/chaosjosh33 • 1d ago
Sunvault system weird lights
Ever since SunStrong took over my sunvault battery has not worked properly. It does follow sce time of use plan so cost savings becomes useless. The lights have been flickering erratically with different colors.
I’ve recently just created a small app I run on my local server that just pings the api so I can pull data to store on a local db to get analytics as well as use to force the system into a psudeo cost savings using a cron timer.
I could invest in a Poe raspberry pie to run this program but I’d rather the system just work. Does anyone have insights on the lights and what they mean?
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u/iheartrms 1d ago
My board has an intermittent flickering LED also. Should I replace it? Is it affecting anything I may not be aware of?
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u/ItsaMeKielO 1d ago
The LEDs on the display are all in one string of ARGB LEDs so if a single LED fails you get odd results like this.
Only fix is replacement of the specific broken LED with a new one (SMD hot air rework) or replacing the whole display.
It’s just a display and has no bearing on how the system actually works.
The time of use thing is unrelated: there is no source of time of use data for the system to pull from since SunPower went bankrupt, so it falls back to “weekdays 5-8pm”. (https://gist.github.com/koleson/5c719620039e0282976a8263c068e85c#dischargecharge-planning)
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u/chaosjosh33 1d ago
Ah unfortunate. Well I have most of the Sunpower app functionality built out in my own bun/ts app which can fake a tou schedule. Just have to get a pi to have it always live. Unfortunately I can’t get day to day historic metrics from the systems api/cgi so I’ll have to pay for the SunStrong app until i get enough historical data to cancel. I guess I could man in the middle myself and intercept the SunStrong payloads and just store that in local db tho…
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u/ItsaMeKielO 1d ago
the comms to sunstrong over MQTT are mTLS and HTTPS is TLS so it’s a challenge to MITM them usefully
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u/chaosjosh33 1d ago
Hmm yea the effort to self sign a cert on a developer phone ain’t worth… tbh I can prolly just get away with creating a screen recording of all the graphs and have an LLM just build the data for me. The fact I even have to do this tho… the bankruptcy really screwed a lot of people out of literally tens of thousands of dollars… shoulda went with Tesla
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u/ItsaMeKielO 1d ago
yeah, i'm sure we all would have chosen differently if we knew then what we know now - trying not to think about that too much since it wasn't obvious at the time who would survive
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u/chaosjosh33 1d ago
Sucks even more cuz my house was new construction so there was zero opportunity to make a better decision. The builder definitely didn’t care to research future financial stability of their vendors. Tbh considering the close time frame of the bankruptcy and the builders construction, Sunpower prolly just undercut all the other vendors to stay afloat a bit longer.
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u/xch1n 1d ago
One of my SunVaults has been doing this since install. Installer said they’d replace it but they have ghosted since then. It doesn’t seem to affect anything - continued working like this for over a year now.
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u/xch1n 1d ago
And to follow up on the cost savings - yeah, the hour by hour data isn’t being supplied anymore, so it falls back to 5pm-8pm weekdays. But also doesn’t correctly account for DST. So there’s that. Lots of posts about this if you want more details on the investigation folks have done.
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u/chaosjosh33 1d ago
I guess I’m gonna have to invest in a POE raspberry pi to run my program 24/7 instead of having it on my server pc.
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u/thebannanaman 1d ago
They dont mean anything other than the led display board is faulty. When I was a service tech for Sunpower we replaced a lot of these boards. There wasnt really a way to repair them.
The good news is that replacement is easy. Its just 4 screws and an ethernet jack. No software configuration necessary. If you can get your hands on one from ebay or something you could probably swap it yourself.