For those of you who take a real interest in your electricity/energy use, a good monitoring system is essential! In my eyes, it certainly beats taking endless notes and writing pages of numbers.
The Coolpower EMMA system, with the monitoring system ELMON provides loads of great data, specifically the net import/export of electricity from your complete system. It also shows what’s going into your hot water tank with the Throttle, where fitted, and/or to the Blusine Stack battery system.
We have an EMMA fitted at our office, and we thought we’d share today’s very interesting data. Broken cloud and bright sun mean the solar output is all over the place. EMMA is doing a perfect job of ramping the feed to the heater (space heating this morning, water heating later on) to ensure there’s no energy being exported and “wasted”.
We also have a fairly unstable grid connection, and this behaviour without EMMA would result in solar PV cutting out from high grid voltage on the sudden peaks in power output. EMMA prevents this and keeps everything running flat out.
Click on the image to see full size…
Whilst the graph appears daunting, with loads of data shown on one set of axes, it’s by far the most convenient way (when you get used to it!) to see precisely what’s going on at any given time.
You can see that the load in the office is fluctuating too (electric heating, boo-hiss!) by the tan “appliances” line, the green “generated” line is ramping up and down with the sun, but crucially the blue “exported” line is at or very close to zero, with corresponding power over the load to ensure no import and close to zero export.
Get all that?! It’s less confusing on a nice day on a system without fluctuating loads as per below. Lots of energy going into the tank, low import (red) and minimal export (blue).
In any case, all of this information is interesting and useful when trying to ensure low bills and efficient use of energy.
You can have this fitted by us, with or without EMMA to heat water or Bluesine Stack battery system. Just get in touch for more details or pricing.
