Since september 20th we are the proud owners of 13 solar cells on our roof with a maximum peak of 3120 watts. This should be sufficient to cover at least 50% of our electricity consumption. The panels ‘look’ towards East-South-East.
For who is interested, the brand of the panels is Komaes 240 Wp. The invertor is a Diehl Ako 3100s.
As always I love to have graphs of usage, connect stuff to the internet and so on. Unfortunately the official supplier tools to do this costs hundreds of euro’s.
As an alternative I’ve bought an Arduino Mega2560, the big brother of the microcontroller which I used in my prevous project, the waterdrop device. My main goal was to gather peak power and total power during the day. I’ve found a program that can upload it to pvoutput.org straight from the Arduino.
My stats are visible on my graph page at pvoutput.org
I’ll be probably extending the functionality of the Arduino energy monitor in the next weeks and post my findings and sources on my site.
You’ve said you have bought your energy management system already but I’d recommend you take a look at the Wattson Plus http://www.diykyoto.com/uk/
As an introduction:
I write for a website all about solar PV and do a lot of interviewing and reporting on what’s happening in the UK’s energy efficient circles. eg: http://blog.theecoexperts.co.uk/blog
And I write more sober information pages to inform people about solar. EG: http://www.theecoexperts.co.uk/how-much-do-solar-panels-cost-uk#1
I’ve interviewed Mark a couple of times, he’s one of the guys who runs Energeno, the company behind the Wattson. Nice guy. Anyway they have a range of cool gizmo’s, if you’re into quantifying your own data and being able to handle it all in a neat ways.
Hope this is useful in some way.