Solar PV inverters often have their own web-based monitoring solutions. However some of these do not make it easy to view current generation or consumption due to refresh delays. Out of the box monitoring is usually good for looking at long-term time periods however lacks the granularity to see consumption of appliances over the short term.
The challenge
Realtime monitoring of Solar generation and net export helps to maximise self-consumption. For example coordinating appliances to make best use of solar PV.
Existing inverter monitoring does not show granular data over recent history – for example, to be able to tell when a dishwasher has finished its heating cycle and whether another high-consumption appliance should be turned on:
Solution
This sample android application allows realtime monitoring whilst charting consumption, generation and net export:
The chart shows recent data over time and is configurable for SMA and Enphase inverters. In both cases the local interface of each inverter is used to pull raw data:
- SMA: https://<inverter_ip_address>/dyn/getDashValues.json
- NB – Smart Inverter Screen must be enabled
- Enphase: http://<envoy_ip_address>/production.json
Code
https://github.com/niftimus/SolarWatch
Features
- Interactive UI:
- Configurable settings:
Limitations / areas for future improvement
- Improve security handling of SSL – the current code imports a self-signed SMA inverter certificate and disables hostname verification to allow the SMA local data to be retrieved
- Refine code and publish to an app store
- Remove hard-coding for extraction of metrics
- Better error handling
- Add a data export function
Conclusion
This sample app is really handy to monitor appliances in realtime and allows making informed decisions about when to start appliances.
Analytics Anvil 