Aus Solar / Energy Monitoring

Hey All,
Looking to get solar and want to monitor grid power and solar power, looking at maybe one of these,

says it has vera plugin / driver - so maybe it could be tweaked to run on HE.
What im really looking for is:

  1. small screen to see current Solar Power generating/grid draw/etc
  2. daily usage
  3. historical data/usage

is anyone monitoring their solar is ways I could have a look at ?
Saw these, but it says you need one for grid and one for solar, but not sure it does historical data

This solution is implemented..How do you save in electric bills?

Yeah i ended up finding a Fronius Smart Meter that will be able to do it, but just probably not have a small screen output that im after.

I am going to do this: [Release] IoTaWatt Power Monitor Driver v0.1.20190915

Works well, so I hear, just have not got around to it yet. You can ship it to Australia.

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Looks like a great product. Did you end up purchasing it? I currently have a Fronius Primo inverter which I can pull stats from but that's all I can see atm. It would be nice having this installed next to my sub panel and monitoring every circuit.

I didnt. I decided at about AUD350 shipped (including the stuff needed from Jaycar) , it's probably not worth it. I've almost pulled the trigger twice now, but resisted.

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In case anyone's looking at this thread, I thought I'd add that I've got an Iotawatt unit (iotawatt.com) running for over a year now and the stats are fantastic. 1sec polling over 14 CT clamps (ie up to 14 circuits) and a voltage baseline. I have 'house use' and 'solar in' (and it can give you the difference, ie 'grid use') and then a bunch of circuits so I know what the pool is using, the A/Cs etc. I get it to shove its data into Emoncms (locally hosted) so I can play with graphs and pretty stuff. I've also had it feed data to Home Assistant... when my C-7 arrives I'll see what integration is possible here!

I've been so impressed with my iotawatt I just bought another one as we're moving to 3 phase power and I want to monitor the new inverter(s) etc... easier to add another iotawatt than unpick all the CTs around the existing circuits. The new one will be more a macro view anyway...

I just mention all this here in case any Aussie wants to try something similar, you know it's been done. FWIW I'm Brisbane based. Happy to attempt to field any questions... though I'm still waiting for my first HE unit to arrive, so I can't answer any there yet!

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Excellent. This is a project I would like to do at some stage. I am Brisbane based as well so that's handy :slight_smile:

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Once I have both the new HE and Iotawatt units I will document the various setup bits... and see if we can make use of any iotawatt data in the HE UX. Might be nice to see instantaneous wattage right on the HE...

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Does any one have solar? And have the inverters monitored by HE?
Which inverter does everyone have?

I have a Solar Edge Invertor purchased through SolaHart that has it's own app that I use on my Google Pixel phone and Android tablet, plus there are two separate community drivers by Cobra and Funzie that can poll their cloud services for the same data as the app. The Solar Edge App and the drivers can give you both summarised totals for the current day, week, month, etc, plus "live" system production, consumption, export, etc.

I also have a battery, but haven't taken the time to look at what data I can get on this as well through the drivers.

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Thanks.
I've looked at solar edge in my research.
Good to know there is an integration
Cheers

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I have an SMA inverter and their cloud monitoring updates very infrequently (like once per hour or someting) that makes it useless for any kind of live monitoring. So I put in some iZone power monitors for live monitoring of solar and consumption (since I already have an iZone system). iZone gave me the api that their app uses for the power monitor but I have no idea what to do with it (not a programmer).

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1 system I looked at quoted an SMA inverter. Good to know about the updates. Once an hour is a bit useless!

I've got a 3KW system with a Power-One [Aurora PVI-3.0] Inverter.
Power-One got bought out by ABB and then themselves got taken over by Fimer.
I've only recently got the Inverter online and reporting to the Fimer Energy Viewer iOS App via a Power-One datalogger but I can't figure out how often it's polling the Inverter.
Also I can't just browse to the dataloggers IP address so whilst the data is available via the App, it is outside my abilities to do anything with it and get it into Hubitat. I'm definitely NOT a developer :frowning:

Lets just say it's a work in progress and is somewhat down on the priority list...

Just to clarify what you get with the solar edge invertor, the aggregate daily figures are only updated every 15 minutes by solar edge, i.e. how much have I produced / consumed across the whole day, but the live figures of what you are producing / consuming right now are... well live :slightly_smiling_face:

I'm using an ABB invertor, for 1 of my 2 invertors, and this is my Node Red flow that scrapes the data from the API. It might help you get somewhere. I chuck a inject node at the begining to run the flow every 30 seconds during sun-up.

The API is located at "http://192.168.1.112/v1/livedata"

Summary

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I'm using a pair of SunGrow inverters (one hybrid, one 'normal') and their monitoring is... lackluster... and there is zero integration with anything other than their cloud platform (which is average, at best).

If you really want accurate monitoring and whatever live info and historical stats you desire, get an iotawatt box, get the CT clamps installed, and pump out the data to wherever works for you. I run a VM with emoncms as the database and get graphs like the following, updated in 1 second intervals. Not minutes or hours.

Note I do not have my solar overlaid here at the moment as I have a 2nd iotawatt box to deal with the 3 phase install... but life & time have ensure that it isn't installed just yet. Once that box is in there will be much more graphy goodness happening...

The IotaWatt solution looks really interesting. The tech specs say it stores all the data locally. How do you get the data out of it?

That said, the tech specs also say it can upload to InfluxDB ... which would be nice as I'm already using InfluxDB Cloud to store temp / humidity / pressure data from some Aqara sensors, with the data extracted out of HE, and (because I was bored one day) the state and brightness of all of my LIFX lights. If it can handle InfluxDB natively, it saves me having to write more Python.

I stumbled across this locally developed Solar Monitoring solution.

Just thought to post it here in case anyone finds it interesting.

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