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All set up with PVoutput and wattvision/rainforest

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  • All set up with PVoutput and wattvision/rainforest

    Thanks to user wwu123 for the how to, I had it all set up in no time. Very simple & straightforward. The Rainforest Eagle gets data from my smartmeter & uploads it to wattvision, wattvision uploads it to PVoutput. My Solaredge inverter uploads the generation data. It all comes together perfectly! I was considering the E-Gauge system, but at $99 for the Rainforest and under $10 for the PVoutput upgrade this is a bargain.

    Cloudy all day today, but still not bad...

    chart.jpeg
    6k LG 300, 16S, 2E, 2W, Solaredge P400s and SE5000

  • #2
    Same setup in San Diego

    I have the same configuration with SDG&E. The Eagle and Wattvision with PVOutput is wonderful. I've had it for about 8 months and the accuracy is within 10KW/month.
    [I][url]http://pvoutput.org/list.jsp?userid=27957[/url][/I]

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    • #3
      Originally posted by Bikerscum
      Thanks to user wwu123 for the how to, I had it all set up in no time. Very simple & straightforward. The Rainforest Eagle gets data from my smartmeter & uploads it to wattvision, wattvision uploads it to PVoutput. My Solaredge inverter uploads the generation data. It all comes together perfectly! I was considering the E-Gauge system, but at $99 for the Rainforest and under $10 for the PVoutput upgrade this is a bargain. Cloudy all day today, but still not bad...
      Thats cool. Is there another readout of if your net energy went ahead or behind for the day?

      Hoping to eventually do that with my old decommissioned house meter. Rotation shows
      instantaneous situation and the number shows accumulated. I put some glue on the reverse
      mechanism after they handed it to me. Bruce Roe

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      • #4
        Originally posted by bcroe View Post
        Thats cool. Is there another readout of if your net energy went ahead or behind for the day?

        Hoping to eventually do that with my old decommissioned house meter. Rotation shows
        instantaneous situation and the number shows accumulated. I put some glue on the reverse
        mechanism after they handed it to me. Bruce Roe
        The Rainforest gives you hourly/daily/weekly consumption and generation. So does the PVoutput site, with nice graphs. You get gen/cons./net values...

        My PVOutput site
        6k LG 300, 16S, 2E, 2W, Solaredge P400s and SE5000

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        • #5
          Originally posted by Bikerscum View Post
          The Rainforest gives you hourly/daily/weekly consumption and generation. So does the PVoutput site, with nice graphs. You get gen/cons./net values...

          My PVOutput site
          Don't forget wattvision is part of the pvoutput integration too. They have graphs, charts, and exports as well. But I think pvoutput is really what you are looking for. Just advising you have a few options.
          [I][url]http://pvoutput.org/list.jsp?userid=27957[/url][/I]

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          • #6
            Sort of on topic... I had set up a Rainforest Eagle through Wattvision into PVOutput a week or two ago. Yesterday, it hung and stopped transmitting meter data, but gave no indication that something was wrong. It turns out that SDG&E had reconfigured my meter to support net metering in anticipation of my PV installation, and the Eagle device needed to be repaired by them. The support at Rainforest Automation was great, they even contacted SDG&E on my behalf. It is back up and running today.
            CS6P-260P/SE3000 - http://tiny.cc/ed5ozx

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            • #7
              Originally posted by sensij View Post
              Sort of on topic... I had set up a Rainforest Eagle through Wattvision into PVOutput a week or two ago. Yesterday, it hung and stopped transmitting meter data, but gave no indication that something was wrong. It turns out that SDG&E had reconfigured my meter to support net metering in anticipation of my PV installation, and the Eagle device needed to be repaired by them. The support at Rainforest Automation was great, they even contacted SDG&E on my behalf. It is back up and running today.

              I had the same problem, was running Rainforest Eagle through Wattvision to PVOutput before solar install, once SDGE net metering was turned on it stopped working. The energy consumption reading remained unchanged for hours (actually 24+ hours when I noticed it), and the instantaneous usage reading said "NaN" which a google search revealed that meant "Not a Number." Power cycling the Eagle didn't work (unplugging and replugging power cord). Started ticket with Rainforest Automation because there is no phone number listed on the website, they replied within the hour and told me it was a problem on SDGE's end and to contact them myself. Instead of doing that, I tried one last thing:
              Opened the Eagle settings webpage, under Smart Meter connection setting, I manually clicked disconnect

              When it reconnected it started working again showing the net negative metering with the solar output active. Hope that helps others who have the Eagle up and running before their solar is turned on and encounter the same problem.

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              • #8
                Just finally got going with a similar setup:
                Enphase Microinverters -> Enphase Envoy -> PVOutput
                SCE Utility Meter -> Rainforest Eagle -> Wattvision -> PVOutput

                I'm not all that happy with pvoutput, being far more concerned with production than consumption, but it is about the only place I've found that could actually GIVE me a decent total consumption history, so that's the way I've gone. Took about a month and a half to get set-up though, as I was in an earlier smart meter implementation area for SCE, and even though the meter they installed technically HAD zigbee built in, SCE wouldn't activate it, so I had to wait for a meter swap, then a few more days until I could register my device with them. Once I got it registered with SCE, however, the Eagle was talking and sending data to wattvision within about 5 minutes. Looking forward to seeing some decent data after a while of the system up and running.

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                • #9
                  i just got this going yesterday despite my system being installed last november. the problem is that it's a sunpower system and the generation data has to be scraped one way or another to get it into pvoutput.org. but i think i have it working now.

                  i also have the EAGLE + wattvision, and yesterday i configured pvoutput.org to pull the data from wattvision. however, i think i misconfigured it because as in the OP's image, when the system is exporting power to the grid, PVoutput showed 0 watts consumed. which is true, nothing is being pulled from PG&E but i am also consuming some of the solar production. i noticed that wattvision was set to "consumption" last night and so i switched it to "net". is that the right setting? or is PVOutput never going to understand the self-consumption?

                  i can't tell right now because 1) it's too cloudy to generate much electricity and 2) PVoutput went down and has been down for almost an hour!

                  yeah "NaN" is part of the IEEE floating point number standard and is meant to represent infinities, such as 1 divided by 0.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Originally posted by astroboy View Post
                    i just got this going yesterday despite my system being installed last november. the problem is that it's a sunpower system and the generation data has to be scraped one way or another to get it into pvoutput.org. but i think i have it working now.

                    i also have the EAGLE + wattvision, and yesterday i configured pvoutput.org to pull the data from wattvision. however, i think i misconfigured it because as in the OP's image, when the system is exporting power to the grid, PVoutput showed 0 watts consumed. which is true, nothing is being pulled from PG&E but i am also consuming some of the solar production. i noticed that wattvision was set to "consumption" last night and so i switched it to "net". is that the right setting? or is PVOutput never going to understand the self-consumption?

                    i can't tell right now because 1) it's too cloudy to generate much electricity and 2) PVoutput went down and has been down for almost an hour!

                    yeah "NaN" is part of the IEEE floating point number standard and is meant to represent infinities, such as 1 divided by 0.
                    Net calculations only work properly if you've donated. Check out my system (in my signature) to see what it can look like. Just not today... look at yesterday or the few days before. I haven't made my script robust to service outages, it happens infrequently enough that I don't mind fixing it manually when necessary. You may sporadically see "0" for consumption (as in Bikerscum's screenshot above) if there isn't great synchronization between the generation data and the net consumption data. A time offset feature was recently added to help with that, but I haven't played with it yet.
                    Last edited by sensij; 03-07-2016, 04:59 PM.
                    CS6P-260P/SE3000 - http://tiny.cc/ed5ozx

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                    • #11
                      thanks for the reply.

                      well i did donate 2 days ago, so it should be working. even after switching the wattvision configuration to "net" it seems like the total exported/imported number is not correct... i am going to let the day run through and then compare it to what wattvision thinks (which has always been identical to what PG&E thinks, so it must be right...) yesterday's numbers definitely are not right, but i chalked that up to wattvision being set to "consumption".

                      at least yesterday, i saw long stretches of "0" consumption which correlated well with when i was exporting energy to the grid. i suppose though that on that first screen, this behavior might be correct.

                      edit: actually, now that i look more carefully at it, it does seem to be working differently today. even though for the last hour i've been exporting power, the energy consumption line is still moving up. yesterday it just stopped moving while the panels were generating. also the power consumed line has not zeroed out (except for the period during today's outage.)
                      Last edited by astroboy; 03-07-2016, 06:31 PM.

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                      • #12
                        Can someone explain the how to read the columns on pvoutput?
                        Generated seems straightforward, the total energy the system generated for the day.
                        What exactly is Efficiency?
                        Is Exported the amount of energy sent out to the grid?
                        Is Consumption what you used throughout the day? If so, why does Generated - Exported not = Consumption?
                        It looks like Net is Generated - Consumption, correct?

                        Yes, I'm new at this...thanks.
                        SE3800/REC275TP [url]http://tinyurl.com/z5cqf2v[/url]

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          Originally posted by astroboy View Post
                          i just got this going yesterday despite my system being installed last november. the problem is that it's a sunpower system and the generation data has to be scraped one way or another to get it into pvoutput.org. but i think i have it working now.

                          i also have the EAGLE + wattvision, and yesterday i configured pvoutput.org to pull the data from wattvision. however, i think i misconfigured it because as in the OP's image, when the system is exporting power to the grid, PVoutput showed 0 watts consumed. which is true, nothing is being pulled from PG&E but i am also consuming some of the solar production. i noticed that wattvision was set to "consumption" last night and so i switched it to "net". is that the right setting? or is PVOutput never going to understand the self-consumption?

                          i can't tell right now because 1) it's too cloudy to generate much electricity and 2) PVoutput went down and has been down for almost an hour!

                          yeah "NaN" is part of the IEEE floating point number standard and is meant to represent infinities, such as 1 divided by 0.
                          I've been on PVOutput for over three years and I can count on one hand the number of times I have noticed it down. Some maintenance is expected. I have noticed that it still receives data and aggregates it correctly even if the site is down. I'm a site supporter and make an annual donation. Well worth it and I encourage people to support the site.

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                          • #14
                            Originally posted by DanS26 View Post

                            I've been on PVOutput for over three years and I can count on one hand the number of times I have noticed it down. Some maintenance is expected. I have noticed that it still receives data and aggregates it correctly even if the site is down. I'm a site supporter and make an annual donation. Well worth it and I encourage people to support the site.
                            well that's good to know. yes i am also donating. as far as i can tell PVOutput is the only site that can calculate the daily dollar amount earned/spent which is really interesting to me.

                            the backend was definitely down though - my script was getting HTTP 503 errors while it was down. it seems that after it came back up, it was able to go in and backfill from wattvision, but since my script did not save up the intervals which could not be sent, all of that data is missing. since the power generated data points are missing, so is the net consumption data. but that's OK... i don't really want to maintain my own database here as well
                            Last edited by astroboy; 03-07-2016, 07:18 PM.

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                            • #15
                              Originally posted by Glen View Post
                              Can someone explain the how to read the columns on pvoutput?
                              Generated seems straightforward, the total energy the system generated for the day.
                              What exactly is Efficiency?
                              Is Exported the amount of energy sent out to the grid?
                              Is Consumption what you used throughout the day? If so, why does Generated - Exported not = Consumption?
                              It looks like Net is Generated - Consumption, correct?

                              Yes, I'm new at this...thanks.
                              (Consumption - Generated) = (Import - Exported) = Net, with a positive sign meaning you are a net consumer of energy. The Net number should match what SDG&E reports.


                              Import and Export refer to the actual energy that flowed across the meter, and is what SDG&E sees. Consumption and Generation more purely shows what you generated and what you used, including self-consumption... energy generated by the panels but immediately consumed by local loads before getting to the meter.

                              Efficiency is taking the kWh total for the day over the DC system size. For example, yesterday your system produced 11.908 kWh from a 4.125 kW array, 11.908 / 4.125 = 2.887 kWh/kW efficiency.
                              Last edited by sensij; 03-07-2016, 08:37 PM.
                              CS6P-260P/SE3000 - http://tiny.cc/ed5ozx

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