Raspberry Pi software to monitor solar power setup

[Blackhawk]

I'm hoping that someone out there has a answer to this. I'm looking for a program/OS that I can load on a Raspberry Pi that will monitor my solar setup. Would like to include Battery levels, voltage AC and DC, How much is coming in from the panels, Amps thru the system. I need to store readings to research day-to-day, month-by-month and so on. Please help me figure this out.

I have in the setup:
Renogy Panels (3)100W
PWM Solar Controller 30A
Power Bright Inverter 2300/4500W
Batteries are (8) 17ah in parallel (I know but just starting out)

I hope this helps.

Thank you,
APC

[RoatanBill]

Try this site

If your equipment doesn't have an inbuilt web server that you can point a browser at, then you'll need equipment to capture the data you need external to your existing gear.

Check out http://openenergymonitor.org/ . If you want to get a handle on your electrical energy usage as a whole, they have the equipment and software to do it. That same equipment can also look at your PV side to see what you're generating. Combined, you get an accurate picture of your energy situation.

[Blackhawk]

Just checking back in after two years to see if anyone knows if there is a Raspberry Pi OS that someone has created or knows of one that I can try? Please reply if you know of any.

Thank you,
APC

[DanKegel]

As RoatanBill said, unless your inverter has a monitoring interface built in (and looking at powerbright.com/pdf/PW1500-12_PW2300-12-MANUAL_english_french4.pdf it doesn't seem to), you'd need to measure current somehow yourself. And just like before, openenergymonitor.org still offers a raspberry pi based monitoring system that might do at least part of what you want (temperature, AC current, AC voltage). You'd probably need to be fairly handy and highly motivated to use it.

(Alternately, you could point a camera at the existing LEDs on your inverter but that's harder to convert into something you can graph!)

[karrak]

You could use a stripped down version of my open source battery monitor which you can find here https://github.com/simat/BatteryMonitor/wiki Although this project was originally designed to monitor individual cell voltages it can be cut down to measure just overall battery voltage and multiple currents. Someone has done just that and used a breadboard to wire up the circuitry. Here is a picture of their setup.

[pvtracer]

Hey Blackhawk, sorry for not getting to this a few years ago, but for the DC side of your project you could use an instrument from a company called Stratasense (www.pvtracer.com) which can monitor the iv curve and record the desired IV readings at specified intervals. The entire software stack runs from either windows or a linux/raspberry pi. Accuracy is better than 1% on current and voltage and it works with most of the panels on the market below 500 watts peak power. You can also easily integrate thermocouples and the Pi can sit a few hundred feet away form the panels under test.

For the AC side, there are many smart energy meters as well to measure all AC electrical characteristics. I recommend this product but it may be overkill: Shark-100 or 100T

Best,
_Kellen

[ChargeMPPT]

You could use the raspberry Pi and a camera or I have use this from rdagger https://www.rototron.info/raspberry-...-api-tutorial/ maybe you can adapt to your charge controler my tracer works great with it.