Anyone else using a Raspberry Pi to log their inverter data long-term?

Been running a Pi 4 on my static caravan setup for about 18 months now logging all my Victron data via VE.Direct — honestly it's the best thing I ever did, because now I have receipts when my other half says "you've been watching too much telly and that's why the batteries are low."

Grafana dashboards are absolutely the way to go if you want to make it look like you know what you're doing at parties 📊

Few things I've learned the hard way:

• Power the Pi from a proper 5V buck converter off your 12V bus, not some dodgy USB phone charger — lost about 3 weeks of data to SD card corruption before I sorted that
• Back up your InfluxDB database to a USB stick on a cron job, future you will be very grateful
• Fogstar batteries have lovely consistent discharge curves when you finally get to graph them properly, very satisfying

The only faff is keeping Raspberry Pi OS updated without accidentally breaking your logging scripts — I've done that twice and both times felt like an absolute muppet.

Anyone else gone down the rabbit hole of automating alerts? I've got mine texting me if the state of charge drops below 20% overnight, which has saved my bacon a couple of times when I'd left a heater on by mistake.

Would love to know what sensors others are pulling in — I'm thinking about adding a clamp meter on the mains hookup circuit for when I'm on a campsite, to cross-reference against the inverter figures. Anyone done that?

@HeatherWalker my Pi has logged so many embarrassing "why is my SOC doing that at 3am" moments that it's basically become a therapist for my tiny house electrical system 🤣

@HeatherWalker mine started as a "quick weekend project" on the cabin and somehow evolved into this sprawling thing pulling data from the Victron via VE.Direct and a cheap RS485 dongle on the water pump, all shoved into InfluxDB with Grafana dashboards I obsessively tweak at midnight.

The moment that sold me permanently was catching a slow battery fault — one cell in my Fogstar pack quietly underperforming for weeks. The graphs showed this tiny recurring dip that I'd have completely missed otherwise. Saved me from what could've been a proper drama.

@PhilJackson the 3am SOC weirdness is always the parasitic loads you forgot existed. My Grafana basically became a bill of accusation against my own past decisions.

Only faff is keeping the Pi itself powered cleanly — learned that lesson the hard way when a dodgy 5v feed corrupted the SD card.

@HeatherWalker VE.Direct is fine but if you've got a Cerbo GX already you're just duplicating work. That said, I run a Pi Zero 2W in the shepherd's hut pulling MQTT from Venus OS — logged 14 months of data, found a pattern where my Fogstar 206Ah was getting hammered between 2–4am by a phantom load I'd completely forgotten about. Wouldn't have caught that without the graphs.

One thing nobody mentions: SD card rot. Three Pis died on me before I moved everything onto a USB SSD. Don't log to the SD card. Just don't.

InfluxDB + Grafana is the obvious stack but it's overkill for most people here. Emoncms runs lighter if your Pi is older hardware.

@HeatherWalker the narrowboat life means I've got mine doing something slightly different — I log solar yield against GPS position via a little USB dongle, so I can actually correlate which moorings give me rubbish generation (tall trees on the towpath, I'm looking at you, Foxton Locks).

Eighteen months of data revealed I lose roughly 40% yield on north-facing cuts versus open countryside stretches. Completely changed how I plan my winter cruising routes.

Running InfluxDB and Grafana on a Pi 3B+ pulling from a Victron SmartSolar via VE.Direct. The Pi has outlasted two inverters and a dodgy Fogstar cell that I knew was dodgy but couldn't prove until the graphs told the story.

Data doesn't lie, and it definitely doesn't get defensive when you point at a chart at it.