In openenergymonitor’s solar PV page I saw steps on how to use emonPi with grid-tied solar pv setup. I’m trying to build a monitoring setup for my home solar off-grid setup. It is a small setup with 4x250W solar panels, 1KW solar inverter and lead acid batteries to store energy. Its used to power lights, ceiling fans, computer and tv. I’m trying to build a system to monitor the energy generated by panel, stored in battery and consumed from the system. When power is not available from the setup, power is drawn from grid. Monitoring these stats will help me to better plan on deciding the source of electricity for my load. Please let me know if there are any guides to build such a system.
The short answer is no, there is no one guide for what you want to do.
Monitoring the a.c. side should be straightforward, though with the very low powers involved, you’ll probably need different current transformers and most likely, some small modifications to the front-end circuits of the emonPi (or emonTx - the circuit is the same).
However, if you want to monitor the batteries directly, that is a different matter. If you go back to the old forums, you will find quite a lot of information, including the special measures you might need to safely connect to batteries (because of course, you cannot use regular voltage and current transformers on direct voltage and current).
I suggest you search around there and formulate some plans, then don’t hesitate to come back here if, as is likely, you need some more help.
Thank you Robert. I’ll check the old forum for related discussions.
Hi
Have a look here Monitoring power usage on a 24Volt DC battery solar system using Emontx | Archived Forum
Regards
Ian
Thank you Ian. Seems like there are no off-the-shelf solution. I was hoping to find the right hardware to get all the readings i want and then work only on the software part. Seems like I’ll have to learn a bit of electronics first.