Reporting and Monitoring

ggmf

Thanks again to @Mu22, I'm look to see if I can connect our Growatt Battery to the Pi and have SA monitor directly rather than grabbing info from the inverter. Anybody tried that? I've seen info of cycle counts being presented from the battery, a statistic I'm interested in.

Mu22

I'm curious about the results as I was curious about the cycle count, but would monitoring the battery mean you'd miss a lot of other information?  I finally managed to talk to someone technical at the company that installed my system, and we were talking about failed panels and how they were identified. Which made me wonder if monitoring the strings via the inverter might also be important.

d33p

Thanks for the info. It's now working perfectly!
This is the pinout that SA sent to me which supports exactly what you said.
I'll reply to SA and let them know it works so they can update their website and hopefully avoid any more confusion in the future.
Many thanks again.

ggmf

"would monitoring the battery mean you'd miss a lot of other information?" - No idea, like what? will SA monitor 2 inputs to the Raspberry Pi (inverter & Battery) and hence give me/us the cycle count? the SA web configuration page seems to suggest that it will. Yes, you can monitor the the voltage on the strings via the inverter, which will give you a good idea of what is going on at a string level, however, I went for the Tigo optimisers with Cloud monitoring. Reasons were (i) I have a small amount of shading, nothing major but the monitoring has shown how much shading impacts on the shaded panels output (no I could not fit more panels on our roof). (ii) The cost per optimiser when compared to the life time of the panels is not that bad. The monitoring showed a problem with my install which I was able to have sorted quite quickly. I believe the optimisers will more than pay for themselves with the increased string output (non shaded panels not being pulled down), plus the peace of mind of being able to see exactly what is going on with each panel.

crey

Hi Folks, I am new to the solar world having recently had a system installed consisting of:

• 2 Strings of 8 x 410w Hyundai Black Mono Panels
• SPH 6000TL BL-UP 6kW Hybrid Inverter
• GBLI6532 6.5kw Storage Battery
• ShineWiFi-X Data Logger

I also have an IotaWatt power monitor recording power data for my household consumption, PV output and Grid Import and Export power. This data is uploaded to and influxdb running in a docker container on my nas.

The data missing from my influxdb is Battery charge/discharge etc. All stuff that the Shine app shows me (albeit delayed).

As you clever folks have done here, I want to find the best way to get the data from my Growatt inverter into either the same database or another on running on my infuxdb instance.

I have seen grott as an option which I quite like the look of.

My only reservations are:

1. I can't access the nessesary options to use grott in it's preffered proxy mode. It looks like I will get them if I say yes to a disclaimer pop up when I try to access the setup pages. I haven't done so yet because I am uncertain what the warranty implications would be. My installer monitors my "plant" as well. Presumably from the dashboard at server.growatt.com. So I need to make sure they maintain a data feed (in theory they will respoc to faults before I know about them . Has anyone else had to accept the disclaimer? What are the implications of doing so?
2. The other option is to use grott in sniffer mode (packet sniffing at the network level). This doesn't involve any "messing" with the current installation but it is more process intensive and isn't the recommended method by Johan (grott dev). So my concern is if my nas or router will cope with the load efficiently. NAS is and Asustor AS640T, Router Asus RT-AX88U.

Anyone have any thoughts/experience of using grott in either mode any issues re warranty?

Or any other suggestions as to how to get the data from my growatt into influxdb?

Using the RS485 port is interesting but I guess I'd need another "device" (RPi?) to read the data and feed it to my influxdb. I'm trying to limit/reduce the number of devices I run 24x7 in a drive to reduce my energy use. Hence running what I can on my NAS.