Solar PV Hints, Tips & Troubleshooting

It's a solis 6kwh 5G with a puredrive 5kwh battery.

So here is the house usage before the battery is depleted:

And the battery consumption for the same period:

You can see the battery usage being higher by a little bit when it is relatively idle.

Now with the battery depleted you can still see at least a 50w difference:

Worth mentioning I have nothing connected to the AC backup at this time so it wouldn't be that.

Solis cloud, but I do have 60 second updates not 5 mins.

However I also have a shelly em reading my live grid values and they do match up

Looks like the consumption value from Solis is under-reporting. Or the inverter is using the missing power between the two values?

I don't have solar PV (I'm considering it at the moment and doing my research!). However, for years, I've had an Owl monitor with CT clamp on the incoming meter tail which measures the house consumption. I always noticed that the stats produced from the Owl were always higher than my actual meter readings, though.

More recently I bought a "Watts Clever" monitor which also monitors the house consumption but it uses an LED detector which counts the meter pulses on my digital day/night meter. With this running for days or weeks it produces readings which exactly match the meter. It's a little slower to react to instantaneous energy usage spikes as it counts the pulses and gives a reading every 30 seconds, but overall consumption figure match my bill!

The CT clamp on the Owl will consistently read over 200 watts higher than the "Watts Clever" if I have my induction hob switched into the house circuit (but in standby on its touch controls). It would appear that the reactance in the hob is causing the CT clamp to read current consumption erroneously. Even with the hob now switched out of circuit, the Owl CT is currently reading 483w and the meter is recording 350w. At low energy usage levels the discrepancy varies according to the load consuming the current (motor on the oil burner, fridge kicking in etc.). Pure resistive loads like the kettle or immersion or oven produce close readings.

I'd question the accuracy of those CT clamps generally in monitoring the house load, particularly when grid consumption is low.

Edit - I know the shelly em has a power connection so it's measuring the voltage and therefore should be more accurate at calculating the wattage than the Owl (which uses an average voltage setting), but maybe reactance is affecting the figures at low loads?

Hi guys maybe you can help

The solis has a ct clamp for the invertor.

The myenergi has a hub which has 1 ct clamp which monitors the zappi

And a second which monitors power from the investor ( I think)

Do I need a 3rd ct clamp to see my Pv production

I selected gen and battery on zappi so hope this helps

It changed display 🤞

Ha long

I'll know tomorrow when the sun comes out and see if there is any change. I'd say it's the same as your setup. I'll let you know tks 👍

Yes have the harvi

I'll check what both ct 1 and 2 are doing in consumer unit tomorrow before work.

Seeing what the battery is using is not really what I want, id prefer to see what my pv is making. 👍

You well get that from the Solis app not in real time though. I use the myenergi app to see what is being used from both PV and battery and monitor export to the grid as well as the eddi. Not a perfect ecosystem but still have good visibility of what's happening.

And we are off...

9.9kWh generated at 8am??

Not sure I have seen it mentioned on other threads but this is a handy tool for pricing and designing a layout and will give a list and price of all that is required.

Easy PV > home (easy-pv.ie)

It's down to the INPUT DC Voltage. And you multiply the Open Circuit Voltage (VOC) of the panels (will be on specs sheet / label). Around 12 or 13 per string

So

600v / 40.3v = 14 ²/3

Just an FYI the Q-Cells G9's that I have, have an open voltage of 45.04v, so it very much does depend a little on your panels. I think 12 is probably the way to go. 13 if you really (really) want to push it a bit, but 14 is "a bridge-to-far".

I suspect the inverter would have some tolerance too and that 600.1v wouldn't be the end of it, but no sense in pushing things. You paid enough for it, might as well treat it with some respect :-)