Following the interest in our alternative for the old Enecsys Monitoring system from Nevada to Australia, a time zone feature had to be implemented in a bit of a hurry; but, unlike Windows 10 (which is free), it required a good bit of testing to work correctly. So now those of you in Australia, France and Nevada (as well as those of us from the UK) can all view the data in Local Panel Time - the local time where the panels are. The big test will be on Sunday the 25th when the clocks change.

We are also testing uploading data to Pvoutput.org. My site data appears here My PVOutput Data. We had been having dificulties in getting the power generation graph to total correctly (We understand that the problem was similar to a problem with the Aloaha Data Logger - another alternative to the old Enecsys Monitoring system), but this has now been resolved. All that remains is to schedule the uploads. The plan is to upload 5 minute interval data to Pvoutput.org at even hours thoughout the day free of charge. We also have tested a 'live' system (Uploading every 5 minutes) which will be charged at £7.99 / year. Once the upload routine is scheduled, I will add a page with details for getting set up with PVOutput.

In the mean time

'May the road rise up to meet you,
May the wind be always at you back,
And may the sun shine brightly on your panels....

Regards

Max

New features for our Enecsys Monitor Service

It's hard to find time during summer break for darn near anything aside from camping, taxi service and sleepovers. I have finally had a chance to look at the update to PVOutput feature and expect to have it sorted by the end of next week (+/- a week or two - LOL). Users wishing to have their system uploaded to PVOutput will need to sign up with PVOutput - it is free for the basic service and a minimum donation of 10 Aussie Dollars (about £4.87  / year) for the advanced service.

The basic service allows for a single system (i.e. one total figure for your entire array) and the advanced service allows for multiple systems (one for each panel). You can use either system to set up custom alerts if it thinks something has gone wrong.

There are also various Apps for your smart phone that can read the data. Once I get it up and running, we expect to be able to push data from our system to PVOutput every 5 minutes.

Well, better get back to work while I have the chance ...

Its been a very busy week. Following the acquisition of the Enecsys' default gateway domains, we took on quite a few new customers. Further development was put on hold while testing that the infrastructure would handle the increase in traffic. Based on the geolocation of the ipaddresses (A bit like a postcode the first half of a UK post code) we now can welcome customers all the way from Tazmania to Malta and the Netherlands to Italy.

So, Welcome, G'day, Bonjour, Wilkomme, Welkom.

Looks like site translation has moved up the list...

I can usually squeeze in a few updates on the live system without anyone noticing...assuming it all goes right. The key word in that statement is 'usually'. We had a slight hiccup this weekend and had to take the site down to sort them out. I though it was only going to be for about an hour....

There is a Murphy's Law for time estimation of projects. 'To estimate the time required to do a task, multiply the estimated time by 2 and increase to the next largest unit of time. Therefore a 1 hour job will take 2 days.'

Well that law held true again. The updates were completed Monday morning at 6:00 AM.

As for my roof not showing data for the weekend, that is an old issue with micro inverters. When you have 20 of them, and the weather goes from cloudy to sunny frequently, the RCD will trip. This is a known feature in buildings with lots of flourescent lighting (and no solar panels). In my case the solution was to replace the RCD from a B unit to a C. The reduced the frequency of this happening from weekly to yearly, but as I was working on the monitoring, I didn't notice the tripped RCD.

We also solved a very interesting issue with a customer who thought his array was failing. He had 15 inverters reporting intermittently. When I looked into the data, we also found 4 other inverters that occasionally came through his gateway. The only way this could happen was if another inverter was sending its data out via his gateway. It occured to me that if other inverters were connecting to his gateway, perhaps his were connecting to a different gateway, hence the intermittent reporting. After contacting him, he confirmed that his neighbour had 4 panels with Enecsys inverters. After disconnecting the neighbours gateway, all 19 panels begain reporting from the same gateway.

All this between getting the kids to orchestra on Saturday, the concert Sunday evening (we didn't get back till after midnight) and getting one child off to school for 6:00AM for a trip to Snowdonia.

Hopefully today will be a nice quiet Monday.

Max

4 June 2015

I purchased my Enecsys inverters early on (I had inverter number 16!) and was always delighted with the monitoring system. I did have my doubts that the system would last the full 20 years of the warantee but went ahead and purchased them anyway. I even got the local primary school kids involved in designing a system for their school using Enecsys inverters. Well here we are... Enecsys is in administration and the the monitoring system is down after 4 short years.

By trade, I am a IT contractor, so when the Enecsys site went down, I just figured that with some help from my friends we could rebuild it - how hard coud it be? (4 weeks and still counting...hmmm) No, it won't be exactly the same, and unfortunately the past data is gone, but we have tried to keep the best bits of the old system and add some new ones of our own. The main difference is that the code is ours but the data is yours - download it, print it, whatever. It is your data.

So here it is, our version of the new Enecsys Monitoring System. We are still working on some of the bits. Top of the list are the panel layout screens that light up as the panel produces more energy, local time adjustment, a data download screen and a data feed to PVOutput.org.

I hope you enjoy it.

Max