Have anyone used the Home Energy Monitor to measure the energy generated by a set of solar panels and / or a wind generator? This is DC voltage, then there is basically my question.
Thanks a lot.
Every consumer-grade energy monitor I have seen will measure only AC. Unless the Aeon advertises that it can measure DC, I would guess that it doesn’t.
Usually the workaround is to put the monitor on the AC side of your inverter, which is close enough to the DC power, modulo efficiency. But if you have batteries in your setup then you are no longer measuring instantaneous generation, naturally.
Are we talking the clamp style HEM or the SmartSwitch?
For S&G’s I connected a SmartSwitch to one of my grid tied inverters, but it won’t display wattage when power is being fed into the socket end of it. Kinda expected that though…
Then I made cheater cables male > male between the receptacle and the SmartSwitch & female > female between the SmartSwitch and the inverter, but now the SmartSwitch can’t be powered on due to the inverter not powering up (Grid tied inverters need to sync with the power of the circuit it connects to) That was a scratch the head moment, then D’oh.
Both the SmartSwitch and the HEM should work on non grid tied inverters to measure AC.
The Clamp style should also work to measure DC current, as OHM’s law still applies. The SmartSwitch will not work for DC as it needs AC to power it.