Power Recording

This is a follow up post for my PV.

One thing that was important to me when installing the Solar-Panel was to know how much energy was generated. When you buy a PV panel there often offer you some sort of power meter. This things are almost always a rip off in my opinion.

Instead of such a thing, I used a regular power meter you can get at any eclectic shop. You might wonder why I think this and the answer is quite simple. It makes no different where the power is recorded.

Because the inverter turns the generated AC into DC to make it consumable for the gird we can treat as normal consumer. This relates to the fact that AC is always bidirectional. Hence, I get all power recorded that is directed from the inverter just before it enters my local grid.

One that first day we had quite a lot of sun and it gave me even with some shade on the panel 144W, neat.

It was intended to have a more better power meter, however, because it took ages for the inverter to be delivered, I did not got anything better until much later. On the first days, I’ve wrote the power recorded by hand on the end of a day. In the next post I’m going to describe how this got into grafana and using a automated way to get the power recorded.

so far,
akendo