Solar Energy Monitoring for Vera

Other Devices & Integrations Power Management
1

Hello all, I’m looking at installing the solar panel system that uses microinverters…such as this 5,300 watt system on Amazon: http://amzn.com/B00MS8ALOW

I had a couple questions about monitoring the Solar PV. I would really appreciate any experiences you have at selecting items that can be monitored by Vera.

  1. What is the best monitoring tool for micro-inverter
  2. In Datamine, If I select the category of “Solar PV” for the monitored device…will the Datamine energy page show as a the solar watts generated negative (or add to the overall energy use)?

Thanks!

2

The MI’s in that unit are Enphase. If you search the forum you’ll find posts like:
http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php?topic=11072.0

that cover those. Here I believe you have access to the performance of each MI in the system, which can be handy.

If you have a supported SmartMeter, you can also use a Rainforest Eagle. It connects over ZigBee to your SM, and gives you separate Production and Consumption channels. There’s a thread on reading the data from the Eagle on the forum here as well. This will only give you the aggregate data, but that’s probably enough for most people.

You can also connect a CT over the point where the Power is fed back into your main panel, and read it with any of the Devices that work with CT’s. I have a Brultech, and my Solar channels are just fed into my Brultech (GEM) that way, along with all the other circuits that are individually monitored. Again, it’ll only be the Solar data in aggregate (not the individual MI’s).

So, loads of options… 8)

I use a combination of Brultech GEM (and ECM 1240), and the Rainforest Eagle. I use a few tools to automatically upload to PVOutput (for general tracking/comparison), and to SEG (for detailed analysis/tuning)

3

Hi,

Is there anyone with some experience about measuring the Performance Ratio of a photovoltaic installation using Veraedge and a solar radiation sensor or something similar . I see some zigbee sensor and a device from Popp named Z-Weather that measure also the efficiency of a local solar cell.

Tnks

Donato