Solar iboost.. ebay or keep?

IronGiant

Looks like that is fairly consistent too.  33.3kW generated and 3.8kW exported to date. Which is good in some ways, as it's one of the "free" installations so the only benefit to us is if we are using the generated electricity.

SteveCritten

That has surprised me. How much was the monitor IG?

IronGiant

It was from here Steve.  
OWL Intuition-pv Solar PV Power Monitor TSE200-103 | OWL - Product

Note that you may need the additional Y pack which has an additional sensor (I did) which adds another £20, look at the two layout diagrams to see which you have.

SteveCritten

Hmmm seems expensive. I will think about that one.

neilball

I'm not a fan of the monitors that use CT clamps as I've found them to be wildly inaccurate depending on the voltage of your mains supply (I'm rural so may have a bit more voltage variation than others). In the end I opted for the the CurrentCost Envi monitor with NetSmart Pro gateway and OptiSmart sensors which measure the pulses/flashes of the LEDs on my generation and supply meters. This has proven 100% accurate and I even have virtual meter readings on my dashboard that match my "real" meter registers. I upload the data to PVOutput.Org too as this has a nice graphing/reporting page and links to their App on my iPhone & iPad. It all links together pretty easily and the integration between CC and PVOutput was pretty straight forward too.

                                                                       

IronGiant

How much was that?  I couldn't find an optical solution that was easily available.

neilball

I bought direct from CurrentCost after opening a trade account. I'll look out the costs later. I've had a look at their EBay and Amazon stores and OptiSmart is not currently listed which means they are currently out of stock - seems to be an issue that they are often waiting for stock to meet back orders, so it might be worth dropping them an email via the Current Cost website to check on availability and costs.

jouster

I too had the CurrentCost system and whilst it was good I found myself wanting a bit more so now have a Chorus PV setup which is amazing...all of the details are here...  very very happy with mine...great as like the CurrentCost..it does generation AND usage but without the requirement for a subscription and the historic data is amazing...mind you i am a bit of a geek

Chorus II PV

neilball

I cannot find any technical,details on the website about the sensors for the meter or how the units all communicate, nor details about the App or how it provides information. Would you be kind enough to post some additional info when you get chance?

jouster

Yeah the website is a bit sparse on actually what's in the box.

Basically the sensors are both pulse ones like this.

                                                                               

I've got one on my generation meter and another on my electricity meter outside in it's box.  You also get a a clamp which goes on the main electricity cable that goes into the meter and the combination of the two measures usage.

You also get a network bridge which you plug into your router and the display receives information from it and uploads data to the web portal.

It's the best system I've personally used and I've had Current Cost, and the original GEO Solo PV

Personally I can't see another system that works as well put there so I'm very happy with how it's all working.

The portal gives you display which shows current figures like the main Chorus II PV unit.



There is also a section which let's you look at historical data with lots of configuration