Solar PV Integration

[brucecampbell]

I'm looking into options to better utilize solar power generated from my system.
Ideally when I'm generating more than I'm using, I want to use it instead of pushing it back to the grid (as buy back is less than half the purchase price)

The most obvious is to have my water cylinder power on if I'm generating an additional 3KW. - which is often even in the winter months.

In winter I could also look at turning on my bathroom under tile heating.

My PV system is running a Fronius Inverter.

Is anyone doing this kind of thing here?
What sort of hardware is being used?
What are you using to gather the data from the inverter?

I've seen only one post on here regarding Fronius with reference to Modbus.

Cheers.

[zaphod]

If you have an EV the most obvious use of this would be to charge your car.  I have a solar PV system and an EV, but my solar system pays me a fixed rate and the way that it works for my system is that I sell all power that I produce into the grid. 

But here in Ontario we have highly variable electrical rates based on time of day so I do use C4 to turn off some devices, like my swimming pool pump and hot tub heater, during peak electrical periods.  But that is just done with regular Schedule functionality.

There is a smart electrical panel product called Span which may be of interest to you in this area, and there may be others as well.  But I am not sure if there are C4 drivers or even an open API to facilitate the writing of a driver.

[ILoveControl]

I have a large Solar PV implementation at my house over 30KW of solar and 90KW of battery, my experience in this (Solar PV integration to C4) is its best to keep the integration at the level of Solar PV system > the end points (Water heater) and not go via C4. Here are my learnings why:

1. Use C4 to view states from a UI perspective but not to control. Do this only if you really need/want to, the value vs effort of integrating to C4 (whilst can be done in most cases - I use Victron and there is a good driver for it) is not really worth it.....
   1. The reporting / visibility in C4 is nice, impressive but I found after a short period of time not worth it, I end up going to the Solar system to get the best results in any case.
2. You want the quickest route between Solar & end points given the fast-changing nature of sun, clouds, weather why add C4 in between for control purposes.
3. The level of control + real time data you going to need to drive these types of integrations sit best closest to the solar system.

Not saying it can't or hasn't been done. Infact, I have done it with my Victron system, just saying from learnings adding C4 in the mix is just not worth it.

[South Africa C4 user]

I’ve got a Fronius inverter.

However, it is tied into a Victron system and I use the Victron system to speak to Control4 and then do a huge amount of automation within Control4.  I find it extremely useful for managing load and maximising the use of solar power. 

I use Modbus to talk to my Victron system (you can probably do the same to Fronius inverter directly).  There is now a very good driver (by Homemation) on Driver Central which links most of the key functionality (and data) of Victron into Control4.  If I was doing my setup again, I would use this driver rather than Modbus as it does 90% of what I do with Modbus and the developer has plans to do the other 10%.  Setup takes seconds.  As I also happen to have beta tested the driver, I do admit some bias!

 

[blub]

The current drivers are vendor specific which needs one driver for every inverter company - since all Inverters, batteries and management systems communicate using modbus anyway that is actually pretty stupid.

I know that modbus is complicated but a driver with a good GUI (like this one from Whistle projects) paired with a modbus interface would be a good solution to connect basically anything.
What is needed are data fields for the most common values (like solar generation W now, KWH today, consumotion house, charge dischard rate battery and so on) and a modbus interface where an IP, modbus address and dataformat is entered or each value - with such a driver one could conect any PV system