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  • Load Monitoring Hardware

    Was looking for feedback on solutions to monitor my electrical consumption.

    My current system is 21 Sunpower X327 panels (these are x21 panels that did not flash 335) to a SMA 7000 tl-us with Locus Lgate monitoring solar production.

    I am pondering adding the ability to add some form of load monitoring to my system and looking for input from those with experience using the different smart meter zigbee gateways. My installer advised he could add CTs to the Locus Lgate for $300ish. Which would probably be the best solution, but there are a few concerns with room in the panel to have space to add the CTs.

    So I have SCE with a Smart Meter and am thinking of going the route of a zigbee gateway, but there really seems to be limited information to make my choice. And what I have found seems less than positive. And I am aware that this will report net metering, which is available via SCE website 24-48 hours later.

    So I am looking at the following Gateways:

    Digi
    Rainforest
    Schnieder

    From what I am gathering these units have an internal web server that gives you real time raw data via the local network or you can interface them with a third party service such as Bidgley, Wattvision, or Energyvue.

    So if anyone has experience with any of these combos I would appreciate your feedback.

    Best Regards
    Doug

  • #2
    I use the Rainforest Eagle, it works great with PG&E, though with PG&E I think you have to use the Landis+Gyr Focus Smartmeter and not the GE one to be compatible at the moment. I haven't tried the others. The Smartmeter's own local LCD digital display cycles through about four screens of info, about 7 seconds between readouts of net consumption; similarly the Eagle has about a 10 second lag from when a load gets swtched on to when it reflects in the Eagle "realtime" display.

    Rainforest can upload automatically to Bidgely and Wattvision. Rainforest has a web server you can access within your LAN for instantaneous readout; Bidgely and Wattvision have realtime running usage for the previous X minutes, as well as smartphone/remote apps or web access. Personally I liked the Bidgely live and daily graphs better, as the Wattvision website is slow and has some weird kinks in the horizontal time axis.

    However, otherwise the Bidgely app is completely borked for solar users and cannot deal with the negative net generation, so their algorithms for trying to identify your appliances and where you're using electricity yield a bunch of nonsencial stuff. For that reason, I send my realtime data to Wattvision, which then auto-sends it to pvoutput.org. The latter is where I aggregate my Smartmeter data and my Enphase generation data together. It only captures 5 min intervals, but I mostly go there now, and just use the Rainforest directly for occasional realtime monitoring.

    It's great, although for your situation, pvoutout.org doesn't support auto-uploading from Locus yet.

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    • #3
      Pretty interesting. I am going to follow up see if others haven input.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by Firedoug View Post
        Was looking for feedback on solutions to monitor my electrical consumption.

        My current system is 21 Sunpower X327 panels (these are x21 panels that did not flash 335) to a SMA 7000 tl-us with Locus Lgate monitoring solar production.

        I am pondering adding the ability to add some form of load monitoring to my system and looking for input from those with experience using the different smart meter zigbee gateways. My installer advised he could add CTs to the Locus Lgate for $300ish. Which would probably be the best solution, but there are a few concerns with room in the panel to have space to add the CTs.

        So I have SCE with a Smart Meter and am thinking of going the route of a zigbee gateway, but there really seems to be limited information to make my choice. And what I have found seems less than positive. And I am aware that this will report net metering, which is available via SCE website 24-48 hours later.

        So I am looking at the following Gateways:

        Digi
        Rainforest
        Schnieder

        From what I am gathering these units have an internal web server that gives you real time raw data via the local network or you can interface them with a third party service such as Bidgley, Wattvision, or Energyvue.

        So if anyone has experience with any of these combos I would appreciate your feedback.

        Best Regards
        Doug
        Check out <egauge.net>. Their system offers revenue grade accuracy and internal web server so your data can be accessed and stored locally. Their split core CT's are very small. I was able to fit them in a line side tap junction box.

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