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Old 07-12-18, 09:53 AM   #1
bennelson
Home-Wrecker
 
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: SE Wisconsin
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Default Simple Solar Instrumentation





Last summer, I built a 6.24kW solar array on my garage. It uses Enphase micro-inverters. Overall, I love it EXCEPT that there's no real-time power display!

The system uses power line communications for the individual micro-inverters to talk to an internet gateway called the "Envoy". That in turn feeds data out to Enphase's servers, where I can check my power production.

In fact, you can see my power production too. Look at it here: https://enlighten.enphaseenergy.com/...ms/PqBp1213167

However, the Envoy itself doesn't have a display on it. (It has a few LEDs indicating power, communications, etc., but not how much power I'm making.)

So, I set to work to add a basic Ammeter/Voltmeter to my setup. I bought one off Amazon for about $20, which comes with a current transducer. That's one of those ferrite rings with two wires coming off of it.

I turned off all the power, disconnected one of the solar power leads from the load-side connection breaker and slipped on the Current Transducer, then hooked it up again.

On the side of my breaker panel, I knocked out a 1/2" hole and connected a 4" metal box with a 1/2" conduit spacer.

I took a single-gang metal cover and ground away most of the tabs that would normally mount the screws for a switch or outlet. That made the hole in the cover almost exactly the right size for the panel meter.

The meter also needs power to operate. Instead of tapping power off some other circuit, I added a plain 15A dual-pole breaker dedicated to it, and then ran a pair of 14 awg stranded wires from the new breaker into the 4" box.

The multimeter has 4 screw-down terminals, 2 for the signal wires from the current transducer, and two for power. I made the connections, snapped the panel meter in place in the cover, and then screwed down the cover.

I turned the power on. Other than realizing how easy it is to install the meter upside-down, everything looked good. I re-installed the panel right-side-up, and called it a day.

With the power back on, I can now see in real-time Voltage, Current, Power, and Energy on the display. It's basically a permanently mounted 240V Kill-a-Watt. I like the blue backlight. Looks nice and is very easy to read.

More details at my blog: https://300mpg.org/2018/07/09/solar-monitoring/

I was also on Facebook and another user on a group there reminded me about PVOutput.org. It's a web page which you can push solar production data to, and then share from. I looked at it a while back, and meant to get back to it.

So, last night, I dug through and figured out how to get my Enphase Envoy to send data out to that web page. (I don't even know what an API is, but if it works, it works!)
You can now see live system data from my garage at: https://pvoutput.org/intraday.jsp?id=67934&sid=60383

What's neat about that is it's non-proprietary, and data can be pulled and displayed in different ways on web pages, shared, etc.

So, I now have a real-time meter in my garage which responds INSTANTLY to changes in power production AND a new way to add a solar production output graph to my blog!

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The Following 2 Users Say Thank You to bennelson For This Useful Post:
Daox (07-21-18), stevehull (07-12-18)
 


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instrumentation, meter, photovoltaic, solar

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