stuarth I am glad you have found a method of controlling your system which you are happy with. I have watched a number of his videos over the years, and he has good communication skills.
Home Assistant isn't everyone's cup of tea though, as you have experienced, it has a steep learning curve, technical complexity, reliability, and security risks. You will find out down the road, updates can break integrations, requiring manual troubleshooting and fixing. If your HA server crashes or goes down, automation control of your solar system stops, so you end up having to deploy other system to monitor your first system and so it goes on. You also have to make sure you do a "Full" backup every day, to a different device or cloud service, as one day your hard drive will fail, and you will have to start all over again.
I personally don't want the hassle anymore of yet another complex system in the household to look after which HA is. As I have said many times on here I didn't buy a battery system to become a plant manager. I stupidly thought having a battery system would be like having Solar Panels, which I had installed in 2011 (they just work) with no user intervention or management required..
How wrong I was, owning a home battery system, means endless decisions, about when and when not to charge, SOC issues, tariff rules and costs , Solar headroom, DNO limits etc. HA aficionados' will tell you it solves all of these problems, but it doesn't it just replaces some of those issues and adds other issues you have to deal with.
I would just rather let something else do the heavy lifting these days, hence why I am here subscribing to WW. As I have said on this thread previously I recommend the Inverter Monitor App for Android when you need local control, or the BBC App for Apple users (though not as comprehensive) for when the Internet goes down you can get local control.
No matter what happens at GE Software whether it survives or not, Octopus who have sold 10's of thousands of GE systems, and rely on the GE API for their Smart Tariffs to function, will not let it go to the wall, as this risks an awful lot of bad press for them if that happened. They will be carefully watching proceedings IMHO.
