Home Assistant is getting a KACO RS485 integration for KACO Powador solar inverters of the xi range, such as the Powador 6400xi and 8000xi. These inverters have no network port and no cloud service, so apart from their display, the only way to read them is the RS485 serial bus the integration polls. Joost Lekkerkerker merged pull request #182109 by g4bri3lDev into the development branch on 19 October 2026 at 22:10 Polish time, five weeks after it was opened. The documentation draft (home-assistant.io #48112, still open) lists it for Home Assistant 2026.11, due in early November.

Two ways onto the bus

You need an RS485 connection between the inverters and Home Assistant. That can be a USB RS485 adapter plugged into the Home Assistant machine, or an ESPHome device set up as a serial proxy. ESPHome's serial_proxy component, still marked experimental, exposes a UART on the ESP board to Home Assistant over the native API and has an RS485 port type. The board can then sit next to the inverters while Home Assistant runs elsewhere on the network.

Setup asks for the port and then scans all 32 bus addresses, which can take up to a minute. Every inverter that answers becomes its own device, named after the model it reports and its address, for example "KACO Powador 6400xi (1)". Up to 32 inverters can share one bus.

The documentation lists three things to sort out first:

  • each inverter needs its own address from 1 to 32, set in its display menu under "Inverter address". The "Sym-Bus" address in the same menu is a separate setting for phase balancing and has no effect here;
  • on models with both RS232 and RS485, the "Interface" entry has to be set to RS485;
  • nothing else may poll the bus. RS485 allows a single controller, so a KACO data logger such as the Powador-proLOG has to be disconnected.

The inverters are powered by their solar panels and stop answering after dusk, so run the setup in daylight. Silence at night is normal. During the day, the documentation names swapped A and B wires as the most common fault.

Four sensors, read only

Each inverter gets AC power, daily yield in watt-hours, total yield in kilowatt-hours and a status sensor with 116 possible states, from MPP tracking and night shutdown to specific grid, insulation and fan faults. The integration cannot change any inverter settings.

For the Energy dashboard the documentation recommends daily yield. Total yield comes in whole kilowatt-hours, so on a 6400xi it moves about once per hour of good sun and flattens the hourly bars. Total yield does survive Home Assistant being down, while the daily counter loses any day Home Assistant missed.

After each polling cycle the integration waits about 30 seconds, and it pauses for a second between requests, so a bus with several inverters takes longer per round. The integration starts at the Silver level of the quality scale.

Newer KACO inverters from the blueplanet, TL3 and NX3 families use a different protocol on the same wire and are not supported. For those, the same author wrote the KACO Modbus integration, merged at the end of August.

These inverters do not report a serial number, so Home Assistant identifies the bus by its port. Each port can be added only once, and if you replace the adapter or the ESPHome proxy, you have to remove the integration and add it again. A local USB adapter is stored by its /dev/serial/by-id path, so moving it to another USB socket is fine.