Thursday 26 July 2012

Measuring Solar Panel Performance

Under a scheme in the UK, we are able to have solar panels for electricity generation for free, the basics of the scheme is that you can use as much electricity as you can generate and the remaining generated electricity that goes back into the grid gets paid to the company who supply the Solar PV System.

So we have had one fitted, and obviously I was very keen to see the benefits of having the system, so I bought an OWL CM160 to try and monitor the electric usage.  

The software that comes with the OWL is ok, however doesn't really have much functionality other than displaying historic/realtime usage.

So my intention is to, output the data collected from the OWL to a file that can be read/visualised by external sources, then use this to remotely monitor the data, ideally from my iphone, android phone, or my ipad via apps that I will build.

I intend to hook up another OWL monitor to measure Solar generated power against the house consumption so I can compare the 2.

I will break this up into stages as I go through the project.