How can I tell if I'm using my Solar PV-generated power?

ccbrowning

gefnew said:

Yet my inverter is older than his one, 2011 install and came with Bluetooth and other forms of seeing data with it`s own pc software where it even shows all production and errors and events, SMA 4000-tl 20 , software is Sunny Explorer.

It's not 'his'. But, anyway my Growatt requires a -S Shinelink to get the data off of it instead of the -X version for the current generation. I do see that some people are selling on ebay so I could try and get it. The 'normal' sellers have comments like pre-order etc but when I've tried that route it never works since it's not actually being produced now.

At the moment I have a Hue bulb in a lamp in the loft and a camera so I turn the lamp on when I want and then check what it says. However, the number I have on a meter in my garage seems to increment by the same number that my Growatt does anyway so it's not a huge deal other than not being able to just 'grab' the data automatically. 

QrizB

ccbrowning said:

At the moment I have a Hue bulb in a lamp in the loft and a camera so I turn the lamp on when I want and then check what it says.

That's ingenious, if a bit of a sledgehammer approach

ccbrowning

QrizB said:

ccbrowning said:

At the moment I have a Hue bulb in a lamp in the loft and a camera so I turn the lamp on when I want and then check what it says.

That's ingenious, if a bit of a sledgehammer approach

Luckily that total generation meter in the garage is good enough if you just want a number. Definitely going to sort out the inverter situation some day since we want to add more panels to our system and we'd need another or bigger one in that case.


I have verified that we are definitely exporting some power, so I assume we're using the remainder of what has been generating. One day it was 5 kWh, but normally it's about 1 that we export.

gefnew

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