Kicking the Chinese cloud out of a Deye solar inverter: a hands-on guide

The author of this follow-up piece, who owns a Deye SUN-6K-SG05LP1-EU hybrid inverter paired with a stock IGEN Tech Stick Logger LSW-3 and two Deye SE-G5.1 Pro-B batteries, decided to find out in practice how to stop the equipment from constantly phoning home to the manufacturer's servers while keeping monitoring intact.

The goal was straightforward: retain the ability to watch the solar station's performance, but eliminate the permanent data flow to the vendor's cloud, and then calculate what that costs in money, time, and lost convenience. The author stresses that almost every finding below is tied to the specific inverter model and the logger's firmware version, and on other hardware the result may be different.

Along the way, it turned out that ditching cloud monitoring solves another problem entirely unrelated to China. Inverters are often installed in basements, garages, or utility rooms with no internet access, and the owner simply wants to see the readings in a convenient form. The path to that is exactly the same, so some readers may treat this text as a solution to a mundane household annoyance rather than a cybersecurity exercise.

There is also a detail that concerns neither China nor security. In the stock Deye Cloud app, on the very same screen where the owner watches the energy flow of their own power plant, the manufacturer decided to display an advertising banner for a third-party product. Given that the hardware itself cost several thousand dollars, the presence of ads in the official application became an extra irritant.

This material continues the author's earlier article, which concluded that the risk of connecting to Chinese servers is real but proportionate, and the response should be equally proportionate. The new part shows what that response looks like when applied to concrete equipment, step by step, from disconnecting the stock logger to setting up a local alternative.