DIN rail mounted SolarNodes are the most cost effective way to monitor your solar PV array and your energy consumption. These devices come standard with Ethernet and USB communication ports and they have the ability to be expanded to support devices that require RS232, RS485 and modbus communication protocols.
If you have your own SolarNode and you wish to configure your own local dashboard to view your data (or you want to view a public node data set via your own custom configured web portal), the node-dashboard is what you will want to use.
Try it out here: Access Node-Dashboard
If you are a System Operator or you run a utility and you are looking for a platform to help you aggregate monitoring and control accross many distributed locations, you may want to talk to us about SolarADR. This particular aspect of the SolarNetwork platform is in its early days, but it best embodies the vision we have for the distributed, highly secure and open platform that we call SolarNetwork. Learn more here.
If you are looking to start a distributed energy company you may want to check out SolarBilling. SolarBilling was started to help fledgling energy coops in New Zealand to put together the needed infrastructure to manage their communities billing needs.
Learn more about SolarBilling
Much like the WattsClever wireless monitor, these Cent-a-meter devices transmit wirelessly on a 433MHz signal to supply information on current (Amps) passing through a set of phase wires. These devices are inexpensive and work well (although there is no measurement of power factor in the device). The OWL has a limitation that the 3 phases that it can measure are implicitly summed - there is no separation of the values per phase - unlike the now discontinued Cent-a-meter unit. The design of the RFXCOM units means that multiple transmitters can be listened to concurrently, and used to measure consumption and/or generation.
The Watts Clever is an inexpensive wireless meter that can measure the current from 3 independent hall-effect probes. While it will not measure reactive power, or give you industrial-grade metering, the WattsClever is easy to deploy and gives you a quick view of a three phase household or small-business sized load in real time. It does a nice job of providing a snapshot of resistive load, and can be configured to report kWh on individual phases, or 3-phase combined power. Plus it can be set to report consumption and/or generation.
SolarNodes support a range of single and three phase energy meters for collecting many different data chanels from your buildings electrical circuits (e.g. watts, volts, current, power factor, reactive power etc). Multiple channels can be read from multiple meters using just a single SolarNode.
SMA inverters are some of the best gear out there today, and part of the largest industrial-scale solar plants in the world. Our SMA Yasdi implementation allows for a full monitoring of the SMANet protocol for multiple SMA inverters on shared RS-485 bus. This is a powerful toolset, and we hope to be releasing a native SMAnet implementation in the future.
A design award winning New Zealand made inverter, we love the Enasolar inverter range and can read the data from these devices over their built-in WiFi interface. Enasolar makes that job straightforward with simple IP based connectivity, XML based formatting and low latency. We look forward to supporting these high quality grid-connect inverters now and into the future.
Our current Xantrex interface implementation uses the delimited text format output provided by the original Xantrex GT inverter. This format for Xantrex devices continues to be supported and we hope to further develop the SolarNetwork with this range of equipment.
Morningstar makes some of the most solid charge controllers around and we have support for the TS45, TS45 MPPT, TS60 and TS60 MPPT devices (i.e. all the models that have serial port interfaces). These devices can handle 24V and 48V battery systems and larger PV arrays delivering large current. We look forward to some of the newer high-voltage charge controllers coming out from Morningstar.
Outback inverters are some of the more reliable off-grid and standalone system components in the world. We currently listen to the serial port on the MATE2, and acquire the parameters there to produce standard Solarnetwork formatted PowerDatum.
For product enquiries, please contact: sales@greenstage.co.nz
