We have just installed solar panels on our house in London. We also had panels on our old house in Oxford. How do they compare? Oxford London Latitude 51.753738 51.486880 Panel Size 4000 Watts 5040 Watts Orientation South East/West Split Obviously, it's hard to compare exact weather conditions - lower temperature makes for more efficient generation - but I've picked a date in April where both sets of panels seemed to have an unblemished view of the sky. …
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Mostly notes to myself. My solar panels have an open API. But it's only available if I'm on the same network as the Fronius inverter. I can connect my system to https://www.solarweb.com/ so I can access it anywhere in the world - if I have the right password. SolarWeb has an (optional) guest mode. You can view the panels' performance if you know the secret URl. It looks something like this: https://www.solarweb.com/Home/GuestLogOn?pvSystemid=123-456-789 Visiting that URl sets some…
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I'm hooking my solar panels up to the Internet! Installation Inverter API & Code My solar panels have an API! It tells me the total amount of power they've generated each day. But there's a small problem... I have panels on the East and West sides of my roof. My solar inverter has two MPPT "String" inputs. That is, East and West supply power separately. Luckily, there's an API for that! Thanks to "Grannos" on the PVOutput forum for their excellent open source code which helped get me…
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I'm hooking my solar panels up to Twitter! Installation Inverter Fronius provide a comprehensive API guide - I wish more companies did this. There are lots of unofficial libraries in a variety of different languages. I've written this code in Python3. This is a general tidy-up of the code I wrote several years ago. Here's how it works.... Every minute, the script runs from crontab. If it is after sunrise and before sunset, it takes a reading and writes it to today's CSV file. If it is…
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Having solar panels on your roof is great - but you need something to turn their wicked DC electricity into pure and godly AC. This bit of kit is called an "inverter". It's a big box which lives in your roof working magic. This is what ours looks like: We chose a Fronius Primo inverter - they're a reliable brand which we used in our previous build. I've been impressed that every few months my inverter's software was upgraded. Not bad for a 6 year old bit of kit. And, most importantly for my …
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