How can I see where my electricity is going

mmmmikey

How are you checking the power? With my battery it can take several seconds for it to switch and sometimes longer for the battery energy monitor to react to the change. I'd suggest completing isolating the battery and solar panels temporarily and see if the problem goes away. If that makes no difference then a good place to start is to go round every single socket in the house and see what's plugged in. Then you can systematically switch things off one at a time and see what difference that makes.

MeteredOut

Do you have a smart meter? Have you checked actual usage as recorded by DCC (eg, using Bright, Loop or Hugo apps)?

Or, has your import meter increased by the usage the inverter screen is showing?

I'd be checking that first.

QrizB

snout71 said:

This went on for approx 4 hours this morning

Next time you see that, try turning stuff off at your consumer unit (or the other switchgear pictured in your other thread). You should be able to tell what circuit is repsponsible pretty quickly. Then it's just a case of identifying what appliances that circuit serves.

snout71 said:

I would love to be able to see which room or which socket or which appliance is drawing power and how much, smart sockets? Smart strips?

There's lots of options but really it depends on whether you want to spend money and effort on installing a bunch of energy monitoring kit that you won't ever need again. If you're like FreeBear (or, to a lesser extent, me) you can get however much granularity you want with a combination of smart sockets/switches/breakers/clamps. But while the kit isn't necessarily expensive, the time to fit it and understand it puts it more in the "hobby" world!

snout71

 I rebooted the inverter and also switched from the mode scheduler to the standard charge settings and hey presto all seems back to normal. I am not completely sure whether it was the inverter or the scheduler was to blame, I would guess that it’s the foxESS v2.0 mode scheduler getting confused after several changes. I had several modes, some of which I didn’t know how to remove until I watched a video last night and saw that you just night to swipe it to delete. So 3 of the schedules were switched to off the toggle but might have been interfering. Maybe a few bugs in the new software. I will be able to see the ACTUAL usage from yesterday at some point today so will find out whether it was phantom usage or actually wasted a ton of energy. Either way it depleted my battery as quick as it charged it so there will be some waste

snout71

I have ordered some tapo p110 plugs and might get a few of the smart strips too as well as a ct clamp and see how it goes and possibly expand on it. I have also now ordered an octopus mini

Qyburn

Are you sure you don't have a CT round the wrong way? A lot of solar/battery systems don't actually measure house consumption, they calculate it from measured battery/inverter charge/discharge vs grid connection import/export. 

snout71

Qyburn said:

Are you sure you don't have a CT round the wrong way? A lot of solar/battery systems don't actually measure house consumption, they calculate it from measured battery/inverter charge/discharge vs grid connection import/export. 

I’ll get my installer to take a look, thanks

Petriix

Highly likely that your battery was actually exporting to the grid due to the CT clamp being the wrong way round. It sees the export as import and tries to match it, resulting in exporting at its maximum rate until depleted. 

Qyburn

Petriix said:

Highly likely that your battery was actually exporting to the grid due to the CT clamp being the wrong way round. It sees the export as import and tries to match it, resulting in exporting at its maximum rate until depleted. 

Exactly what I was thinking. In the graphic shown, if the CT was round the wrong way you were drawing 4,998W from solar+battery of which 3,891W was being exported. The difference, 1,107W being used in the house.