Monitor of Solar system

I have a solar system comprised of solar panels and a wind turbine.  I want to monitor the health and status of the system remotely via wifi.  Will this system (and what components) work for my application?

 

Robert Wall's picture

Re: Monitor of Solar system

The short answer is most likely "Yes", but can you tell us more about what you have?

Is it a d.c. or 1- or 3-phase a.c. system, what voltage? What do you want by way of 'health and status'?, e.g. do you want to transmit some data from your inverter(s), and how is that data available to you?

If you only have two single-phase a.c. sources that you want to measure, an emonPi with a WiFi dongle will do what you want. Out of the box, that will give you voltage (with an AC adapter), current, power and energy, and give you the data on local web pages; it will not accept external data such as a serial or optical connection from your inverter. To do that, you would need to add external connections and possibly interfaces, and modify the software.

jurgen's picture

Re: Monitor of Solar system

Thanks for the reply.  I have several solar panels and a wind turbine combined to charge a 12 v battery bank.  An inverter is connected to the battery bank to supply 110 VAC (single phase) to the house.  The electronics and batteries are located about 80 feet from the house.  Currently i have a single monitor that i can measure net amps (in/out) of the batteries, current voltage, % of battery charge, etc. located with the batteries.  I want to be able to monitor all this from my house and possibly via the internet (for when i am not at my location).

 

Robert Wall's picture

Re: Monitor of Solar system

Does your present monitor have a data output of any kind, or are you intending to replace it?

jurgen's picture

Re: Monitor of Solar system

It is a xantronix monitor. No data ports.  I can replace it.

 

Robert Wall's picture

Re: Monitor of Solar system

That is not what I was hoping to hear.

I think the easy solution might be to find a replacement monitor that does have a data output, and the data must be in a published format, because you will most likely need to write some software to change the format.

A somewhat harder way, but one which you will have complete control over, will be to design and build your own monitor using the emonPi as an example. The emonPi is in essence a custom design of 3-input Arduino and a Raspberry Pi in one box. You will need an Arduino with at least at least 6 analogue inputs, as you'll need to add a front end to give you a.c. current and voltage inputs for the inverter output (unless you do that in the house), and d.c. inputs for solar output, wind output, nett battery current and voltage, and presumably you'll need digital inputs for a few temperatures (ambient, battery) too. That should give you enough information to implement a charge monitor in software. The Arduino will communicate serially with the Raspberry Pi.

The Raspberry Pi will give you a Web server that will run emonCMS, getting its data via emonHub, and by adding a WiFi dongle to get onto your LAN, it will be accessible from anywhere.

So to answer the original question, we cannot give you a solution for all your needs 'off-the-shelf'. But all the things you need have been done here and published, your task is to assemble all the parts as an integrated system.

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