How do you save even more money after going solar? The trick is knowing when to consume power and when to minimize your consumption of power. Your solar system generates the cheapest energy that you consume in your home. Because of that, it&#;s a good idea to know when your system is generating power and how much power it is generating. It is also important to know when you are using power, and how much. To monitor your system like a pro, you&#;ll also need to monitor your energy usage like a pro.
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Your solar system monitoring App provides you with hourly measurements of its power production. Use that information to determine when your solar system is producing the most power. You should plan to run major appliances during those hours because that will save you the most money on electricity. It is better to use the electricity produced by your solar system than it is to sell that power to the utility company. Be careful not to consume more power than your system is producing. If you are on time-of-use rates, you might end up paying peak rates.
Monitor your system regularly because its power output is affected by the seasons. As of the time of writing, your system will most likely produce 65% of its annual power output in the spring and summer, and produce 35% of its annual output in the fall and winter. In practical terms, you will likely have fewer hours of electricity production in the fall and winter days. Find out when those hours happen and make the most of them.
There are many types of household electric meters in use. Far more than what could be covered in this article. You should contact your utility company for information on what type of meter you have and how to read it. Find out how much electricity your home is consuming when you run major appliances. Your goal during the day will be to keep electrical usage under what your system is producing for as long as possible.
If you want to track power consumption in your solar monitoring app, you can add a consumption meter to your solar system that will report your consumption right alongside the system&#;s power production. Contact us for more information on how to add a consumption meter to your system.
Depending on what kind of meter your home is serviced by, you may see your meter run backward during the day. If that happens, that means you are producing more electricity than you are consuming. If this is the case for you, it means that you have excess electricity available. You may wish to use that extra power on things like doing laundry. You will only be able to draw power from your system at night if you have batteries installed.
Your electric meter tells you how much power you are consuming, but it does not tell you how much you are paying for it. There are many different ways you can be billed for electricity. A previous Solar Academy article called How to read a utility bill will teach you about the different types of utility rate plans and how to understand how those plans affect your utility bill. If you live in California, you are most likely to be on a time-of-use plan. The important thing to remember about these plans is that the time of day you use electricity determines how much you pay for it. Find out when the peak rates happen on your plan and minimize your electricity usage during those hours. If you can&#;t minimize your usage during peak-rate hours, then you may want to consider adding solar batteries to your system. The batteries provide power to your home during those peak rate hours and then recharge from your solar during the day. Batteries can be configured to provide power went you want them to.
12 months after your solar system is switched on, you may receive a true-up bill from your utility company. The true-up bill reconciles your actual energy usage over a 12-month period. If you produced more net power than you used, you will be credited for that production. If you used more net power than you produced, you will be billed for that excess net usage. Your monthly bill will show your net electricity usage or production. You will want to monitor your net energy usage or production shown in your monthly bill to see if you are staying within your system&#;s electricity production.
You may, like many people have an old refrigerator in the garage, you know, the one that makes a funny noise when it starts. That funny noise becomes a lot less funny when you realize that it may mean that old refrigerator has become an energy hog. There&#;s an easy way to find out.
A cheap device called a Kill-A-Watt that you can simply plug an appliance into to find out how much power that appliance is consuming. Once you know how much power the appliance consumes, compare that information with the amount of power it is supposed to consume. You can find that information in the owner&#;s manual, which you can often find online. If the appliance is consuming more power than it is supposed to, that appliance is costing you money. If you have older appliances, which are often energy hogs, you may want to upgrade to newer energy-efficient appliances. Your utility company may even offer rebates to help with the purchase of newer appliances. You can find the Kill-A-Watt at hardware stores.
By following the steps outlined in this article, you&#;ll be able to stay on top of your solar system&#;s production and your home&#;s energy usage. Once you know about your production and usage, you will find that you&#;ll only need to monitor your solar system&#;s production occasionally, it will be pretty much the same, year after year, thanks to Freedom Forever&#;s 25-year production guarantee. Just make sure to always stay on top of how much power your home is using. That can and does change regularly. If you find that you need more solar power, or that you can benefit from home batteries, Freedom Forever can install them for you.
After installing your solar panels, you need to monitor your system to know how well it&#;s working and ensure you&#;re saving as much money as possible on your electric bills. A solar monitoring system helps take care of that.
Solar monitoring systems are also important for keeping your solar array in tip-top shape. Solar power equipment rarely fails. But in the event of technical difficulties, your solar monitoring system will send an immediate alert, so you can address the problem.
In this article, learn more about solar panel monitoring: what it is, how it works and the best monitoring system brands available today.
Solar panel monitoring systems keep tabs on your system and its output. As a system owner, you&#;ll find that the monitoring system provides production data that you can access from any internet-connected device like a PC, laptop or mobile device.
Each solar monitoring system will work differently, but the objective is the same. Solar panel monitoring systems collect data and report that data back to a server. System owners can log into the monitoring platform online to see how much power their solar panels are producing. And depending on the system you have, you can also set up or text alerts that ping you when PV system performance is not optimal.
There are a few different ways to monitor your solar energy production with a solar monitoring system.
Today, most solar power inverters have built-in monitoring systems.
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Legacy solar products typically do not have monitoring capabilities, but if you have an older system, there are still ways you can monitor solar panel output. You can add a third-party monitoring system that typically uses current transformers (CTs) to measure the system production.
All solar monitor systems keep track of the total power production of your system. But depending on your solar installation, you may need module-level monitoring. Module-level monitoring allows you to see the production of individual solar panels.
In order to get module-level data, you need to have a microinverter or DC power optimizer system. A module-level monitor should be mounted under each solar panel to collect the data.
Regardless of whether you have a grid-tie or off-grid solar system, monitoring generally works the same. Most off-grid inverters on the market today have some level of monitoring capability. Additionally, many of today&#;s charge controllers can also report on solar production.
No matter which type of monitoring system you choose, you&#;ll need to connect it to the internet.
Sometimes data is streamed directly to an isolated PC, but it is far more common for the system to send data to an outside server, thus requiring an internet connection. Here are three options for making the connection:
A physical Cat5 cable connects the monitoring device to the internet router for your home or business. If your router happens to be close to your solar equipment, this could be an easy choice. But if your router is far away from your solar equipment, you might want to look into other methods.
You can also connect your solar monitoring system through wifi, in the same way that you connect your cell or tablet to the internet. Completing setup through wifi is relatively easy. If there is little or no wifi signal at the location of your solar equipment, you may need to install a wifi range extender to broaden the signal reach. The downside of this connection method is that you&#;ll need to remember to re-connect the solar monitoring system if the wifi goes down, or if you change the name or password of your network.
A third option is to use a cellular modem to connect the solar panel monitoring system to the internet. You need to purchase the cellular modem as a separate accessory, then add a supplemental cellular data plan. Solar monitor systems do not use much data, so adding another data line is relatively inexpensive compared to what you might be paying for another cell or tablet.
Enphase microinverter systems include the Envoy system monitor. This solar energy monitoring system provides module-level assessments in 15-minute increments and sends system alerts if there is any sign of trouble.
GoodWe&#;s Smart Energy Management System (SEMS) is cost-free, accessible for multiple users, and easy to set up. Within the portal, you&#;ll able to access any pertinent information about your system from any device with an internet connection.
Sol-Ark systems, which are suitable for both off-grid or grid-tie applications and include backup power solutions, offer full system monitoring through the PowerView (PV Pro) platform. The internal solar charge controller provides solar production data while the inverter shares critical details, like battery state of charge. With Sol-Ark&#;s monitoring system you can adjust settings or troubleshoot your system from any device with an internet connection.
When deciding how to monitor your solar panel output, you&#;ll want to look for these features in solar panel monitoring systems.
Learning about system failures through your electric bill isn&#;t ideal. By the time you see your bill, you may have lost a full month of solar power production. You should set up solar monitoring to alert you whenever your system is not performing well, so at the first sign of a problem, you can take care of it immediately to avoid losing power output.
We recommend module-level monitoring if your system allows for it. If there is a problem with your solar panels, knowing exactly which solar panel has an issue can greatly reduce troubleshooting time and costs.
Many solar monitoring systems also offer power consumption monitoring, which is helpful for regulating your electricity usage. Often, new solar owners get so excited about their solar transition that they increase their electricity consumption. Consumption monitoring will help you dodge unexpectedly high electricity bills.
Most monitoring systems report their data to the server every 10 or 15 minutes. In most circumstances, that is frequent enough for you to keep tabs on your system, and know how well your system is performing.
If you&#;re not sure which solar panel monitoring system is right for you, reach out to experts at GoGreenSolar &#; solar veterans who can provide you with the best monitoring recommendations. You can also shop GoGreenSolar&#;s extensive collection of solar panel kits, which come complete with monitoring systems.
GoGreenSolar is also here to help you with your DIY solar panel installation needs, offering technical support and guidance through your solar journey from end to end.
For more information, please visit Solar Panel Production Line.