In short
- Alert on things you can act on: a load to shed, a cabinet to ventilate, an installer to call.
- Add a time condition to every alert so that a two-second spike does not wake you up.
- Keep the alarm sensor from the BMS: it is the one that says the battery itself is unhappy.
Pytes Monitor puts the battery in Home Assistant with sensors such as sensor.pytes_monitor_state_of_charge, sensor.pytes_monitor_temperature, sensor.pytes_monitor_cell_max_voltage and binary_sensor.pytes_monitor_alarm. With those, five notifications cover most of what can go wrong.
1Not enough left for the night
At 21:00, if the charge is below 35 %, send a message. It is early enough to delay the dishwasher or the car. The exact level depends on what your house draws at night; look at a few mornings first and set it a little above where you usually wake up.
2Too hot, or too cold
A battery cabinet in a loft can pass 40 °C in summer; one in a garage can drop near freezing in winter, when the BMS limits charging. A notification above 40 °C or below 5 °C, held for fifteen minutes, tells you to ventilate or to expect slow charging.
3One cell running ahead
If the highest cell goes above 3.55 V while the pack is still charging, the cells are drifting apart at the top. Once is nothing; the same message several days in a row is worth a look at the cell table in the dashboard.
4The BMS raised an alarm
The alarm sensor turns on when the BMS reports a warning or a protection. Send it as it comes, with the time. Most are harmless and clear on their own, but you want to know before the inverter suddenly switches to the grid.
5The monitor went quiet
When Pytes Monitor stops reporting, every sensor becomes unavailable. Ten minutes of that usually means a Wi-Fi or power problem at the battery. The free Cloud can send the same warning by e-mail after six hours, which is handy for a holiday home.
Keep them calm
Each alert gets a delay, a quiet-hours rule if it is not urgent, and only one message until the value comes back to normal. That way the phone buzzes rarely, and every buzz means something.
Common questions
Do these alerts need the Cloud?
No. Home Assistant reads the battery on your network and sends the notifications itself. Only the e-mail alert for a silent box comes from the Cloud.
Can I copy them ready-made?
Yes: the automation generator on our Home Assistant page writes the YAML with the real sensor names.
Which thresholds should I use?
Start with the values above, then adjust after a week of real data: your house and your cabinet are the reference.
