I know this is what I want, but I don't know what I need.

Hi,

Could some stalwart please give me some advice on what I need to achieve the following.

I live in Spain, off-grid, using a wind turbine and solar panels, with a backup generator (also used for battery management).

I would like to be able to monitor both locally and by using something like Xively, which I use to monitor my servers and IP cameras etc. I am disabled and partially sighted with times spent in hospital where I still need to keep an eye on the system.

I have a number of Arduino UNO / Mega and Raspberry Pi's that I can throw at this project as well as compatible current sensors. I would like to be able to monitor the wind turbine (3 phase unregulated 24VAC, which is regulated to 24VDC for battery array feed).  I would like to be able to monitor the 24VDC solar panels. I would like to measure the 220VAC +/- output from the generator, volts, amps, hertz. Also the output from the Inverter, volts, amps, hertz.

Additionally I would like to monitor the SOC & SOH of the 2VDC Lead Acid batteries that make up the battery array.

I want to be able to utilise the data locally by displaying on a TFT display and also on a web server.

I have an RJ45 cable net laid out already to carry the data but would really appreciate help with sensors and collation.

I will be throwing weather and IP Cameras into the mix as soon as the power management is resolved.

Thanks and kind regards,

jB

TrystanLea's picture

Re: I know this is what I want, but I don't know what I need.

Hello jB, sounds like an interesting project!

The emontx the main openenergymonitor sensor board can do your AC monitoring, it has 3x 0-23kW CT sensor inputs and 1x 0-4.5kW CT sensor input (CT sensors are the same - different burden resistor inside the emontx), here's a link to the emontx in the shop: http://shop.openenergymonitor.com/emontx-v3/

For DC monitoring, its not really a standard openenergymonitor thing but when I did a project several years ago to monitor a small off grid pv system I used some of these http://www.coolcomponents.co.uk/acs715-current-sensor-breakout.html from cool components. Quite straightforward to interface with an arduino. There are several different versions depending on your amperage requirements.

You could then have a raspberrypi running emoncms and use the dashboards feature to create your display content if you can connect the TFT to your raspberrypi. Emoncms is the data logging and visualisation web app that we have developed here that can run on a raspberrypi or on a larger server.

You can either connect the emontx and the raspberrypi via wireless rfm12 433/868 or doing something like this might be of interest https://github.com/openenergymonitor/documentation/blob/master/Applicati...

Lots of options, let me know how I can best advise.

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.