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I'm having a 6.8kw PV system installed in the next month or two and I'm looking into monitoring my home's usage from the grid. A SolarEdge SE6000 will give me the monitoring on the PV side, but I'm wanting to monitor how much grid power I'm using as well. Is there any good device that will combine both PV and grid power into one interface? Otherwise, I'm looking at the Eyedro EHEM1 to monitor the usage from the breaker panel. Any other suggestions?
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wattvision, smappee or TED + pvoutput.org ? -
How accurate do you want the monitoring to be? The internal solaredge monitoring is only rated +/-5%. The power report tends to be decent, mostly 1% or less, while the energy report tends to be more, typically around 3% higher than the power report. Most of the time, it will report more generation than actually occurred, with more consistent reports on clear days than on cloudy ones.
If you live in CA or have a smart meter, you might find that the Eagle, by Rainforest Automation, will work for consumption monitoring. It talks directly to the power company's meter (via Zigbee), so there is no calibration error and you see exactly the same thing the power company sees.
If the Eagle isn't an option, the TED is a good one-stop solution for production and consumption monitoring. I would suggest installing both, even though the SolarEdge data is available. The timestamps on the SE data are wonky, and it makes it difficult to synchronize the generation and net consumption data well enough to subtract them to determine true gross consumption.
If you want revenue grade monitoring (accuracy within 1%, or better), EKM meters sell kits that would let you monitor generation and consumption on one meter, and have a variety of method to publish those data. Wattnode makes somewhat higher quality equipment, but may take more development to get at the data. You can connect a wattnode meter directly to the SE inverter, and use the SE portal for access to it. For revenue grade, count on spending $400-$500 on the equipment.
In any case, check out PVOutput.org. Even if you just stick with the canned SE data, you can publish it there (for free) and see how your system compares to others in your area. In my opinion, this is the best way to get a quick read on how well your system is performing, although a deeper understanding is necessary to interpret small differences.CS6P-260P/SE3000 - http://tiny.cc/ed5ozxComment
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Hadn't come across that one when I was looking for mine.
They claim 1% accuracy vs. TED 5000 says they have 2% accuracy ("TED is calibrated at the factory to be accurate to within 2%, however, you will find that it is generally closer to 1%")
(I read that as 2%)
They use wireless, vs. TED's wireline networking.
And it looks like they have some software that should theoretically be able to differentiate loads.
(Personally I wouldn't put a lot of trust in that being too accurate - but if it works it could be a fun thing - "Hey look - I can see when the stove goes on and when the microwave is running when I'm cooking dinner" )
On the other side of the argument -
I think Neurio loses on price.
And I *think* it only does 1 pair of CTs for the cheapest version; 2 pairs for the "solar home" version. (It's not very clear to me what's included in each version that you can buy)
(I wanted 4 pairs)Comment
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I have the TED5000 with 3 MTUs. On my spreadsheet, the readings from the MTUs are within 1% of the revenue grade production and net meters. The MTUs can be calibrated in 1% increments so after 1 year, I have adjusted them to be fairly accurate. The "Big South American River" site has it available for $200.00.Comment
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Yeh, I got one of those about 6 months back. I posted my experience with it on this forum somewhere, I'm sure a search will find it for you. In short, I like it, real simple to install, App is nice and slick. I can see my solar, grid and the consumption of many of the appliances in the home all in one place. I would also recommend to get some of their Comfort Plugs which enable you to switch appliances off and on. I think you get one with the basic Smappee but I went all in and got a handful more, I think they were about $10 each. I got the vampire load of my home way down with a few of these things installed on things like the TV. I found inaccuracy is about 1% compared to by utility meter, which is about the same as most others I looked at.
I know you can download the data into Excel, but I can't really comment on it as I haven't really played around with this feature as the App has all the functionality I need.Comment
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I use something made by Blue Line Innovations and you can get both the device that clamps on your power meter and the WiFi data collector for ~ $200 total.
You then have to set up an account through PlotWatt which provides some pretty good detail of your usage per household and appliances with line and bar graphs. It also provides an estimate calculation of what you are spending based on the POCO for your area.
This is probably not as accurate and the TED or even Smappee hardware but has worked for me the last 2 years.Comment
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Aeon Labs makes z-wave two devices (ZW095-A and DSB28-ZWUS (2nd gen)) that will measure power usage bi-directional, These can be used to monitor your net usage. They can be found under $100. I am trying to find out what the differences are between the two. The ZW095 uses Z wave plus. I don't know if there are any other differences.
I have a Smartthings hub and am looking at one of these to monitor my net usage. When I get my system installed, I want to figure out how to used the SolarEdge API and get both sets of data on my Smartthings app.Comment
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SolarEdge gives reasonably good data on a daily basis, with typically a few % of calibration error. The 15 min (or 5 min) data available through the API isn't great if you plan to use it to calculate the gross consumption over a short time period (by subtracting generation from net consumption), because the timestamps and averaging scheme won't line up well with your other data source. You'd be better off just getting one more CT and putting it on the PV circuit, so you can monitor consumption and generation near-simultaneously in one device.CS6P-260P/SE3000 - http://tiny.cc/ed5ozxComment
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Just found another option. Its called Curb (18 CTs (monitor main and 16 circuits) for $350. http://energycurb.com/
Looks pretty promising. You can really monitor where your elect is being used.Comment
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