August 8, 20233 yr To start with, some advice for prospective Growatt purchasers, give their Wi-Fi monitoring modules and their monitoring app a complete skip. For the same price you get Solar Assistant and a raspberry Pi (+some setup) or a prebuilt from them. This is not a plug, it's simply a quality product vs the dog pile you get for the same price. SA also collates the 2 inverter inputs into a single readable graph, where the Growatt app you have to switch between them. However, there's a monitoring issue I want to solve and wondering if anyone can help. This is what a normal day looks like without grid power and is great for what I am looking to monitor. It was the same on the Growatt App and SolarAssistant. That big lump of yellow in the middle is where the inverter(s) used PV power to charge the batteries. After that, you can see the PV usage matches household usage. What I would like to see is the total PV incoming power, not just what is being used from the panels. Reason being is I need to know how much of an impact a certain tree is having on my early morning generation, because there seems to be a flat spot from about 8am to 10:30'ish. Is there a setting I can ask to be set, or firmware or something I can fiddle with to make that visible? Setup is 14 panels, 450w or 480w have to go look at the quote, but somewhere around there. 2 Growatt SPF5000 inverters, 2x 5Kwh batteries.
August 8, 20233 yr 27 minutes ago, DMNknight said: What I would like to see is the total PV incoming power, not just what is being used from the panels. The only way to get that is to have loads that draw the full power from the panels. The panels will never produce more than they are asked for from the loads/inverter/battery.
August 8, 20233 yr 30 minutes ago, DMNknight said: Reason being is I need to know how much of an impact a certain tree is having on my early morning generation, because there seems to be a flat spot from about 8am to 10:30'ish. Chop the tree down, your solar system is saving enough trees to help the planet
August 8, 20233 yr Short of choppping down the tree, you can estimate it by considering that the generation curve throughout the day should be roughly symmetrical if the panels point North. I'd delay the charging of the battery to start at noon on a clear day, thereby try to build up the graph of the generation in the afternoon, and then flip a mirror image over to the morning along the axis of the mid-day peak.
August 8, 20233 yr Author Food for thought, thank you both. Disappointing that you can't actually track what I thought I could. My logic says the energy from the sun is hitting the panels anyway, so X amount of energy must be produced at all times and discarded through some means, I assume heat generation. The house was built north/south, so the roof is well angled for generation.
August 8, 20233 yr 56 minutes ago, DMNknight said: Food for thought, thank you both. Disappointing that you can't actually track what I thought I could. My logic says the energy from the sun is hitting the panels anyway, so X amount of energy must be produced at all times and discarded through some means, I assume heat generation. The house was built north/south, so the roof is well angled for generation. It is just like Eskom power is also hitting your house (sometimes) but luckily we don't pay for what we don't use 😀😀😀 Edited August 8, 20233 yr by Scorp007
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.