diy solar

diy solar

Solar Assistant - data logger

Definitely persistant.
Yeah, looks weird. Shame the SA charts don't include battery power on that chart as well*.

If the firmware update doesn't remove it, I'd be dropping Pierre a note, take a pic of that chart and the battery power chart below it as clearly something is amiss with the data. 1kW doesn't come from or go to nowhere!

* I recently put InfluxDB and Grafana onto my Home Assistant, so at some stage I'm thinking I might recreate that plot with the battery power included.
 
Heres this morning. Not fixed, and even weirder, where is this magical ~450-500watts coming from the grid going to?

Solar Assistant.png
 
Oddly enough, if I force it to Utility First under the power tab, then it looks like everything is working as it should...

Solar Assistant.png
 
Awesome to be getting 4k this early in the morning (10am) and be 2 hours behind me, fighting horrible shade from trees on the south side of my house, Joe.
I'm fortunate to have no shading on my panels all day, makes my smaller array much more usable!
 
Too bad you cant overlap other charts together. That would be cool
My first crack at charting PV, battery, load and grid power on same chart. My system rarely uses grid so it doesn't appear.

Screen Shot 2021-11-06 at 3.21.12 pm.png

While I can overlay the battery on the same chart in Grafana, the data doesn't have the immediacy/responsiveness of Solar Assistant, especially the gauges.

The chart itself seems to have quite a lot of interpolated data. I set it not to fill in if the gaps were > 10-min. Not sure why so may gaps, just the way InfluxDB polls data I guess.
 
Well, I stand corrected, I guess the update did fix the problem, and I just needed more data to come to my conclusion. You can see in this screenshot that it is doing what it is supposed to be doing. As PV power rises, the Grid power falls. Thanks for the help guys!

Solar Assistant.png
 
the update did fix the problem

Glad to hear.

Yesterday was one of those I chose to tell Solar Assistant to turn on Utility first for a while rather than use the battery. I just prefer to not discharge the battery much at this time of year. We are only one storm away from an outage.

Screen Shot 2021-11-09 at 8.49.47 am.png

The short load spike at about 8:20am is the pool pump starting (has a 5-min start cycle at ~900W). But I have a pretty sharp threshold set for turning it back off if battery voltage drops too much, which will happen if the previous day's solar wasn't so great and battery is not fully charged.

It was a crappy rainy morning so I decide to let it sit for a bit before changing mode to Utility first and re-starting the pump. To begin with I chose to use Utility first for a short while, then reverted to normal mode to see if there was enough solar PV but I could see it was going to be a pretty constant drain on the battery so I flipped back to Utility first and set it to run that way for 4 hours so my much larger grid tied PV system could power the pump while the off-grid solar could direct it's energy into the battery.

By lunchtime the weather had improved somewhat but I just left the Utility first program in place (was out doing other things) and by early afternoon Solar Assistant flipped the inverter back to regular SBU mode. Solar had ample capacity by then to supply pump and keep some battery charge going.

It could have been changed back a couple of hours earlier. That cost me all of 6 Aussie cents in lost solar export credits.
 
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