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diy solar

diy solar

CHINA kills all non Sol-Ark branded DEYE unit in the USA this morning.

It does occur to me, though, that this would only be reliable for an array facing true South with no shadowing?

You could mitigate that by analysing both sunrise and sunset, but someone in a valley would show as further from the equator than they really are by this method and someone with a SW-facing array would show as being further West than they really are.
Panels tend to make plenty of voltage in low light, but not much current. I think that as long as the panels are seeing the sky you should be able to estimate dawn and dusk fairly well.
 
Yes it would. I have 2 south facing and 1 west facing and the 45 degree west facing power peak is about 2 hours behind the south facing. Throw in an east facing and the peak could easily be +- 2 hours off of solar noon. Now voltage hitting say around 50% peak is only a few minutes different for mine between the 45 west and straight south panels.
Peak doesn't matter. We are just trying to measure the time of dawn and dusk.
 
Yes it would. I have 2 south facing and 1 west facing and the 45 degree west facing power peak is about 2 hours behind the south facing. Throw in an east facing and the peak could easily be +- 2 hours off of solar noon. Now voltage hitting say around 50% peak is only a few minutes different for mine between the 45 west and straight south panels.
Oh, but note he’s not looking at the peak, he’s looking at sunrise and sunset and the length of the day.
 
Oh, but note he’s not looking at the peak, he’s looking at sunrise and sunset and the length of the day.
So remember kids, when you’re trying to obfuscate the position of your array, make sure you set the time zone to the one you hope people will think you’re living in. Not that that will work, but it’s better than nothing.
 
I wouldn't connect my inverters to the internet no matter the manufacturer.
Super dumb question but... is there a way to remotely monitor my EG4 system without connecting them to the internet? Maybe a 3rd party device that could decode and broadcast my system's SOC and function status?
 
Super dumb question but... is there a way to remotely monitor my EG4 system without connecting them to the internet? Maybe a 3rd party device that could decode and broadcast my system's SOC and function status?
Well, yes, and no. (“Ask not of the Internet, for it will answer yes and no, and everything in between”)

Solar assistant can talk to your inverter and make your system information available in their cloud, but it’s not clear if you do (or should) (trust the solar assistant cloud.

You can get a router that supports incoming VPN tunnels, so that you can put your mobile device on your LAN and look at something like a non-Internet-cloud-connected, solar assistant, for instance.

Because I’ve got all the data and all the bits and pieces already running, I just create a little webpage every minute and upload it to an AWS S3 bucket as a static webpage:
IMG_8191.jpeg
There are a lot of options, it depends on what your requirements and skill set is.
 
Panels tend to make plenty of voltage in low light, but not much current. I think that as long as the panels are seeing the sky you should be able to estimate dawn and dusk fairly well.

Hmm. Having looked at my Solar Assistant, I'd think that current is probably better than voltage? Voltage rises gradually starting well before the official "sunrise" time and reaching its level for the day well after that.

Current is at least an abrupt jump from 0, so you're not trying to identify a point on a curve; today current first rose above 0 about 15 minutes after "sunrise" but today is also totally overcast.

(I have a bit over a year of 10s resolution data on my Solar Assistant right now.)

I'm starting to think there are too many variables in this that a cloud service wouldn't know about for this to work reliably either.
 
Peak doesn't matter. We are just trying to measure the time of dawn and dusk.

Oh, but note he’s not looking at the peak, he’s looking at sunrise and sunset and the length of the day.
Volts are more reliable than wattage from looking at my graphs.

The wattage is very effected by shadows and direction, the voltage depending on direction only lags like a minute. What you get for a threshold looks tricky though, my voltages get up to 50% of peak 30+ minutes before official sunrise and are all over the place around sunrise because of the MPPT attempted to use what little power there is. And my 50% of peak is under the MPPT's min voltage. So the threshold might be when the array hits MPPT min voltage but depending on what the total voltage of the array is to tell you how much ahead of sunrise the voltage hits that limit. Even with good data I think there would need to be a lot of testing to get to sunrise and sunset right. My voltage end is about 6 minutes different with the west getting direct sunlight and the south being in the shade. On morning both are in the shade so the times are only different by a minute.

Current is only an abrut start up IF there is direct sunlight/no shading early and late.

First power curve is staight south and but has shade until about 8:30 this time of year, I need to move it back another 50 feet to get out of the shade of the house and a tall tree 300ft away in winter.

Second power curve is facing 45 degree west and really has no shade once the sun gets onto that part of the roof until almost sunset.


1732314405169.png

So assuming east facing vs west facing vs early morning/late evening shade there is probably a 15 minute window depending on array direction and shade. so a couple of hundred miles give or take.
 
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Well, yes, and no. (“Ask not of the Internet, for it will answer yes and no, and everything in between”)

Solar assistant can talk to your inverter and make your system information available in their cloud, but it’s not clear if you do (or should) (trust the solar assistant cloud.

Solar Assistant works great without a cloud connection too; you just have to block it from getting through your router and you can use it on your local network.
 
Solar Assistant works great without a cloud connection too; you just have to block it from getting through your router and you can use it on your local network.
Indeed, but the question was how to monitor it from the Internet. If you are not using the solar assistant cloud, you need some kind of VPN or port forwarding or something to look at the local solar assistant that is on your LAN.
 
you are talking like i just bricked thousands of peoples inverters i just posted a fake picture on the internet my friend, chill
Dude - A valid question was presented. Where did you get the Deye inverters from? But most importantly, were you aware of Sol-Ark's exclusivity contract for the United States market, including the overseas territories? If you did, and I'm guessing you did, eres un sendo cabron! If you did, you took advantage of all the customers you installed a system for, and therefore, are legally liable for the replacement costs. Get ready to purchase Sol-Ark inverters out of you own pocket to replace those you "husiastes" to your victims. Comete esa en lo que te mondo otra. Si presumo correctamente, eres peor que una rata!
 
Indeed, but the question was how to monitor it from the Internet. If you are not using the solar assistant cloud, you need some kind of VPN or port forwarding or something to look at the local solar assistant that is on your LAN.
Gotcha.

I did build a proxy that can expose just the data (without the config portions) of my Solar Assistant to the Internet to let my installer confirm a warranty issue a few months ago, so a non-cloud-connected Solar Assistant can do that too if you put a proxy in front of it.

If anyone's interested, I can write up how to do that.

(Yeah, I did not DIY my inverter and panel install; it would have been nice to do that part, but it would have taken way more time than I could put into it. I did DIY the whole monitoring and control system, at least. :-)
 
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Gotcha.

I did build a proxy that can expose just the data (without the config portions) of my Solar Assistant to the Internet to let my installer confirm a warranty issue a few months ago, so a non-cloud-connected Solar Assistant can do that too if you put a proxy in front of it.

If anyone's interested, I can write up how to do that.
I wouldn’t mind taking a look at it, though I’m not sure I could reproduce it with my infrastructure.
 
Dude - A valid question was presented. Where did you get the Deye inverters from? But most importantly, were you aware of Sol-Ark's exclusivity contract for the United States market, including the overseas territories? If you did, and I'm guessing you did, eres un sendo cabron! If you did, you took advantage of all the customers you installed a system for, and therefore, are legally liable for the replacement costs. Get ready to purchase Sol-Ark inverters out of you own pocket to replace those you "husiastes" to your victims. Comete esa en lo que te mondo otra. Si presumo correctamente, eres peor que una rata!
Don't waste your time. He's already banned again. lol
 
I wouldn’t mind taking a look at it, though I’m not sure I could reproduce it with my infrastructure.

If you have an Internet-visible web server that can also talk to your Solar Assistant, it would work for you.

I used Apache talking to a customized version of <https://github.com/sensepost/wsproxy>, with wsproxy talking to Solar Assistant and rewriting all requests for the config parts of the interface.

(I'll get the customizations that do the filtering onto a git server somewhere and post a link one of these days.)
 
Personally I'm not worried about using Solar Assistant cloud. There's no political issues with South Africa. And I don't think that Solar Assistant can get deep enough to do any damage.
 
I am all for saving money! But, some (possibly more than you may realize) are not willing to spend 10 hours a week maintaining all our stuff with the latest updates and hacks.

Personally I would choose to not spend over 2 - 4 hours annually with this crap.
No Luddite here, but those Amish folks have a LOT of very sound ideas about the beauty of simplicity...

Yup.

If the SHTF, and upper-atmospheric nukes are set off to generate EMPs to take out pretty much every modern electronic device, so-called "third-world" countries (as well as the Amish) will be asking "what's the big deal?" It will just be another sunny day in paradise.

Meanwhile, those of us in "developed" countries...after a week or so...will be eating our neighbors and drinking their swimming pools.
 
Please don't ban him until he answers my questions. Not that I need much from this individual to confirm he's a low life who took advantage of his customers.
He may have told the customers they were getting something without manufacturers warranty support in their region. They could have bought 2 or 3 of them for the price of one Sol-Ark, so it might be a gamble customers are willing to take. If he didn't tell them there was no manufacturer warranty for the product, that is a different story, or if he was selling them under some program that required them to have warranty support in his region. It's a fully UL listed product, I believe, so it's not like he was installing unsafe junk.

He may or may not be civilly / criminally liable, depending on what his contracts with his customers said about the product and what level of fraud he may have been engaged in in regards to any government subsidy / loan programs.

Let's not forget the most important thing though, Deye should not have bricked them. Deye should have unbricked them by now. What Deye did is possibly criminal and certainly worthy of attempted civil remedy.
 

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