Monitoring Solar Stuff

[lile001]

I have a solar water heater system, and am soon to have a solar electric system. At the same time, I have been monitoring power usage of other interesting loads int he house, such as the electric water heater (usage drops dramatically when it is sunny!) and the HVAC equipment.

Right now, I have an array of analog gauges, and a panel full of old used analog electric utility meters. The used electic meters are going cheap now, there are warehouses full of them, because the utilities are switching to digital remote read meters. I will use a Sunny Boy inverter, and they have an expensive little box ($1000) that can monitor the solar panel production on the web.

So, predictably, I started out reading all these meters once a monthy, then began to slack off as it became a chore. It would be cool (and expensive) to monitor all of this stuff digitally. What have other folks done to monitor thier solar stuff?

[Mike90250]

I think there are other alternatives to the $1,000 monitor box for Sunny boy. let me poke around a bit to see.

[lile001]

Let me rephrase the question a bit - Can one system or computer (say an old used laptop with some sensors attached) Monitor both solar electric and solar water? Has anyone done this? I'd be capable of handling the computer programming part of that (done it before!) but I'd like to know what other people have done to monitor solar water/electric stuff before diving in. creating such a system could easily suck up as much time as the entire rest of the solar project (and a blissful time it would be...) but I'd like to check out options before deciding to do it.

[And yes I know the Sunny box could be bought on discount for less than $1000, but I can't remember the price right now so i threw out a number]

[Mike90250]

Yes, one computer can monitor all. Heck, even a 1999 Palm PDA could monitor it, if it had the IO. I think Julie has a business that does monitoring software and such. One reason I like Xantrex and the new Morningstar stuff, open standards/source freeware for it.
One USB port can manage several serial ports.

freeware can be found at http://www.solar-guppy.com/forum/mon...tware-f23.html for Xantrex and Morningstar gear

[dhlabs]

i'm using a brultech ecm-1240 ( http://bit.ly/2FgsG1 ) to monitor my panels and various other circuits in my house. i wrote my own software to interface to the ecm-1240 and it runs on a hp t5700 thin client. i am using rrdtool ( http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool ) for charting. here's some of the charts i've created:

http://bit.ly/aQI5fW
http://bit.ly/bYdc83

[lile001]

i'm using a brultech ecm-1240 ( http://bit.ly/2FgsG1 ) to monitor my panels and various other circuits in my house. i wrote my own software to interface to the ecm-1240 and it runs on a hp t5700 thin client. i am using rrdtool ( http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool ) for charting. here's some of the charts i've created:

http://bit.ly/aQI5fW
http://bit.ly/bYdc83

Ah! This is exactly the kind of stuff I was looking for. Something designed for the task, but flexible enough it can be hacked into shape. Sweet!

[innovativesolar]

Keep us updated on how it works!

[dhlabs]

this is a very short screencast showing my live power monitoring overlay on our house's GUI http://bit.ly/dtKoqF

[Jason]

thanks for sharing the link dhlabs

[photowhit]

People have hacked a kill a watt meter to work wirelessly.

Search for - kill a watt wireless hack - and you'll find a fe links.

[Jason]

hi photowhit,

thanks for joining our forum. I see you've lived off grid for quite a while. Your contribution is greatly appreciated and we are happy to have you.

here's a link to the kill a watt hack:

http://www.ladyada.net/make/tweetawatt/

[Vern2]

TED 5000 Full monitor - Starts $200

TED 5000 Please check this new product TED 5000. It came out last year, 2009. The TED 1000 has been around for a while. I do not have any affiliations with the TED people. I just think it's a great system. NO WIRING NEEDED, uses your house wire. Easy to put on the internet.

I have the Sun Power monitoring system. Sence the Sun Power system has been installed total generation has been captured by a new smart meter installer by the utility company. The power company's smart meter reads today, 16,349 kwh's, Sunpower's monitoring has captured 16,502 kwh's total by today. That's 99.07 percent has been captured by SRP that says to me, SMA inverters are right on the money and Sun Power is giving real numbers with their monitoring system. check it out Sun Power monitoring

If your interested in TED 5000. TED 5000 montoring TED 5000 monitoring will stay active until my provider changes my IP address. I here you asking, "How does TED 5000 compare?" It's within 2 percent just like they say in the install document. With TED, I don't have any long time numbers yet. But weekly numbers are giving me within 2% of Sun Power. See link below for Solar install >Home Projects>Solar.

Legion Ted 5000, for the graphic tab.
Yellow - volts
MTU 1 - black - total being used by house.
MTU 3 - red - 50 gal hot water heater
MTU 4 - blue - 5 ton heat pump
MTU 2 - green - solar production

It defaults to the Live Dashboard. I don't have any profiles set up. Check out history and the Graphing, set options on graph to - minute live and 4 hours. It will take a couple minutes to come up. Pic1 is a 24 hour graph for today.

[russ]

Love your system Vern! Looks very good and having followed you through the various stages it is fun to see everything in action.

Russ

[greenHouse]

The TED 5000 has serious problems -- I would never install one if I didn't have to. Not to say the idea isn't a good one, but the PLC component barely works or can require a lot of work to =make= work.

And since Mike mentioned upthread that I have monitoring products, if you want to ditch "Footprints" and avoid Google PowerMeter(tm), my gear will do inverter-direct monitor =and= capture TED 5000 data =and= integrate the two =and= monitor solar thermal =and= even control it

[frankjohnston25@gmail.com]

what's the issue with the PLC?