Aloha all,
I have been trying to monitor my photovoltaic system and it is not working. It stopped working. I believe it was in May. I did not see any information about a renewal or any information on ending the monitoring of my system. I would like to get it up and working again. Please let me know what I can do on my part to get it working again.
Thank you very much,
Kevin
Welcome, Kevin, to the OEM forum.
I doubt anyone can help you with just that information. On the whole, we’ve got quite good at guessing what is going through people’s brains, but we’re not mind-readers. We need to know more.
What is not working, the PV system, or the monitoring system, or both?
What have you got? What did “it” do when it was working? What do you want “it” to do in the future?
Does that imply the monitoring was cloud-based and run by the manufacturer or the company that installed your system? And the PV system itself is working but it’s the monitoring that isn’t?
My first thought is that will be impossible - it most certainly will be impossible if you cannot tell us more, and then the solution might be to replace it. But it might not be, nobody can tell at this stage.
Very broadly, there are two options: Extract data from your inverters (assuming they are working), or add equipment to measure independently. Which will be viable and the best will be largely determined by what you know about “it” and what you want to know.
Hi,
It is a system to monitor my PV system to see how much electricity it is producing. The Monitoring Co. is Enecsys . I thought I was in contact with the them through this community.
Thank you for responding,
Kevin
That’s not a name that I’ve heard. A quick Google search seems to show that Enecsys UK Ltd is in liquidation. That probably explains why you’ve heard nothing and any service they were providing has ceased.
We’re an international community, but the “owners” who created this website live and work in Wales (part of the UK). Like the name suggests, the interest here is Open-source Energy Monitoring. We have no specific ties with any manufacturer. The support (the forum here) is largely provided by volunteer effort, as I’m doing now.
As there is unlikely to be any useful information about how the inverter data is formatted - and it’s likely to be encrypted anyway, the “easy” solution to your problem is to install a new monitoring system.
What we can offer is a “DIY” monitoring system, based on units that you can buy via our on-line shop.
If it’s a single inverter that you have, and all you want to know and record is the output of that, or the combined output of several inverters, and it’s single phase split supply (USA standard domestic: 120 V - 0 - 120 V), then the emonPi will give you a means of measuring and recording the PV production.
Basically, it’s a Raspberry Pi that runs our emonCMS software, it records the data and then, via your LAN and a web browser, allows you to see the near-instantaneous production and history.
[Edit]
I have found this:
https://www.enecsys.com
It appears one of the original developers is offering a monitoring service.
(In very rough terms, an emonPi costs the same as 4 years of monitoring, but everything is on your premises and totally under your control.)