Posted March 20, 20205 yr So I am ready to take the next step in my off-grid/on-grid solar adventure.You can view my 1st post here Now to start measuring all this eskom power solar battery stuff. I started by looking at all the inverters and the monitoring software they come with. Mixed results on that, some work ok, some are total crap. Solution - D.I.Y. seems to be the way to go on this too. I have looked at some of the forum posts here and also again a load of youtube videos and power forums. My conclusion is that it is 100% better to D.I.Y. and I have settled on the software, hardware etc on doing this. My first setup is now completed and I can start measuring power consumption from various sensors and get a visual representation of the cost of power from eskom. For now I have started off just measuring eskom main power usage, will be expanding this out from here to start measuring individual circuits and then start bringing my solar production and battery measurements into the mix. Currently the stats above come from the following hardware. 1- Raspberry Pi4 4gig as the main influxdb and grafana server. 2 - Pi Zero W at the main eskom db to do usage measurements 3 - RPIZ_CT3V1 - voltage and current sensor board (attached to pi zero W) This initial setup will be further expanded to add sensors to all the main home circuits individually (Lights, plugs, geyser, stove etc) Extra hardware will be an expanded ac current sensor that can accommodate all the circuits and the extra sensor hardware to measure the solar and battery side. To date all this has cost less that the retail equivalents out there (sonoff effergy eyedro vue etc)and I have more precise control over exactly what and how I can measure everything. And of course I can visualize everything exactly how I like using grafana. If you have any tips or suggestions then do let me know and share your sensoring/monitoring experiences with the community so we can all learn from each other Edited March 20, 20205 yr by WannabeSolarSparky
April 14, 20205 yr It would be great if the dashboard could be shared or published either via JSON or on Grafana too? Â Anyone manage to replicate the EMONCMS dashbaord on grafana?
April 14, 20205 yr 11 hours ago, Durran said: It would be great if the dashboard could be shared or published either via JSON or on Grafana too? Â Anyone manage to replicate the EMONCMS dashbaord on grafana? I can try giving it a shot, what does it look like?
September 15, 20204 yr Author Finally Got around to doing the full Power Monitor Dashboard last night Day 1 - Testing accuracy etc Â
September 15, 20204 yr 4 minutes ago, WannabeSolarSparky said: Finally Got around to doing the full Power Monitor Dashboard last night Day 1 - Testing accuracy etc  That is absolutely brilliant!! Can you share the JSON query for it or export somehow so I can try import it? I have tried making kine like this but nowhere NEAR this level and I dont think I will get to this level
September 15, 20204 yr Author 2 minutes ago, Durran said: That is absolutely brilliant!! Can you share the JSON query for it or export somehow so I can try import it? I have tried making kine like this but nowhere NEAR this level and I dont think I will get to this level There you go. You would need to add some extra plugins to grafana for displaying the gauges. 1 - D3 Gauge 2 - Default Grafana Gauge  Power Monitor-1600160263595.json
September 15, 20204 yr 9 minutes ago, WannabeSolarSparky said: There you go. You would need to add some extra plugins to grafana for displaying the gauges. 1 - D3 Gauge 2 - Default Grafana Gauge  Power Monitor-1600160263595.json 272.96 kB · 0 downloads Thanks WannabeSolarSpark, Ill definitely give this a bash. Very excited!!Â
September 15, 20204 yr Author Full day running the new dashboard Asic miner started up at 500 watts to use up excess production as the battery bank started the day full, everything above 500watts was running into the battery bank. Now to setup some relays that will start and stop the miner automatically depending on the battery state of charge and available solar production.
September 15, 20204 yr Man oh man that looks gorgeous! I need to get my ass in gear and get my inverter driver finished so I can also have pretty graphs.
September 15, 20204 yr 1 hour ago, WannabeSolarSparky said: Full day running the new dashboard Asic miner started up at 500 watts to use up excess production as the battery bank started the day full, everything above 500watts was running into the battery bank. Now to setup some relays that will start and stop the miner automatically depending on the battery state of charge and available solar production.  That's very nice. Might give it ago. I dig the gauges. Â
September 15, 20204 yr Author The cheap gadget (esp8266+dth11+ads1115) that measures the solar voltage amps temperature and humidity. This is the mock-up so far, will be putting it into a nice enclosure with its own power-supply once the calibration is completed and design finalised.
September 15, 20204 yr 14 minutes ago, WannabeSolarSparky said: The cheap gadget (esp8266+dth11+ads1115) that measures the solar voltage amps temperature and humidity. This is the mock-up so far, will be putting it into a nice enclosure with its own power-supply once the calibration is completed and design finalised. Hmm, don't you get the solar volts / amps from the inverter?Â
September 15, 20204 yr Author 5 minutes ago, Rclegg said: Hmm, don't you get the solar volts / amps from the inverter? No I tried that you end up needing to use vendor supplied software and in general they are not too accurate or limited in what you can do with them. I am an opensource fan and a habitual DIY junkie. Edited September 15, 20204 yr by WannabeSolarSparky grammar attempt
September 15, 20204 yr Author 21 minutes ago, WannabeSolarSparky said: The cheap gadget (esp8266+dth11+ads1115) that measures the solar voltage amps temperature and humidity. This is the mock-up so far, will be putting it into a nice enclosure with its own power-supply once the calibration is completed and design finalised. Here is the sketch for the esp8266, should work with most arduino devices with a bit of tinkering. voltsampstemp_15_september2020_amps_volts_temp_working_rev1.ino
September 15, 20204 yr Author Sketch for the battery bank voltage meter. Still to add measuring amps in and out of the bank. batteryVoltage2020june22.ino
September 16, 20204 yr Aaaaah ok, I see how you did it, Nice! It’s actually a neat idea to make it easy to implement and vendor agnostic. I’ve taken to hacking the protocol on my inverter in order to get the same data outside of Goodwe’s shitty cloud based api. But as with all projects, I’m a great starter...
September 16, 20204 yr Author Had some time today to add the battery charge/discharge info. Also moved things around a bit to make sense for me See updated Grafana JSON and new Solar Sketch with added battery charge discharge code. Power Monitor-1600266455741.json rev1_02_amps_volts_temp__hum_batdisscharge_charge.ino
December 24, 20204 yr Author Taking the whole DIY measurements experiments to a whole new level. This is my latest experiment and if all goes well I will move all my solar and eskom data collecting to this new online server which is accessible from anywhere in the world. ThingBoard offer some great software for IOT, so I have set up a server and installed it to test how it all works. This is my 1st attempt at connecting my solar IOT Sensors to the cloud and I must say it has been quite simple compared to how I did the previous lot. https://things.diysolarsa.com/dashboard/721dec10-453c-11eb-98cf-bbe9b2be0448?publicId=1b882610-430f-11eb-a274-371723afc4e6 Â
January 28, 20214 yr Author On 2020/12/24 at 12:15 PM, WannabeSolarSparky said: Taking the whole DIY measurements experiments to a whole new level. This is my latest experiment and if all goes well I will move all my solar and eskom data collecting to this new online server which is accessible from anywhere in the world. ThingBoard offer some great software for IOT, so I have set up a server and installed it to test how it all works. This is my 1st attempt at connecting my solar IOT Sensors to the cloud and I must say it has been quite simple compared to how I did the previous lot. https://things.diysolarsa.com/dashboard/721dec10-453c-11eb-98cf-bbe9b2be0448?publicId=1b882610-430f-11eb-a274-371723afc4e6 Â The Link Above No Longer Works. Here Is The Correct link To The New Monitoring Panel. Still need to connect all the solar sensors https://things.diysolarsa.com/dashboard/721dec10-453c-11eb-98cf-bbe9b2be0448?publicId=1b882610-430f-11eb-a274-371723afc4e6 Â
February 2, 20214 yr Author Latest Data Panel with newly added sensor data. Now includes full weather data, both local and city wide. Environment sensors now fully functional on version RC1.019 Next on the list is to migrate the eskom and solar sensors onto the new data panel. Â
February 5, 20214 yr Author Ok now the eskom sensors have been added to the new online dashboards All left to do still is add the solar sensors. Main Dashboard:https://things.diysolarsa.com/dashboard/721dec10-453c-11eb-98cf-bbe9b2be0448?publicId=1b882610-430f-11eb-a274-371723afc4e6 Eskom Dashboard:https://things.diysolarsa.com/dashboard/43833da0-6793-11eb-81f0-65343f28c1fb?publicId=1b882610-430f-11eb-a274-371723afc4e6 Edited February 5, 20214 yr by WannabeSolarSparky
March 1, 20214 yr Man these all look brilliant. How does a dumb person get all these fancy dashboards with an axpert inverter and emoncms?
March 4, 20214 yr Author Latest Update, some minor tweaks done and finally got around to adding the inverter AC side.https://things.diysolarsa.com/dashboard/721dec10-453c-11eb-98cf-bbe9b2be0448?publicId=1b882610-430f-11eb-a274-371723afc4e6
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