Third party power/battery manager
Posted: Fri Jul 12, 2024 12:47 pm
Hi
We moved into our current home about 18 months ago and inherited a 4 kW PV system with a Solax SK-SU3700 inverter and 2 * 4.7 kWh Pylon Extra2000 batteries. The system was installed in 2015 by Solar Dawn, who went into administration 2 years later, so it is not maintained. I have tried (unsuccessfully) to register the system with Solax so have no way of monitoring it, apart from a home-grown Python script that scrapes the inverter web interface intermittently and extracts the current/daily/total power gen - AFAIK the inverter does not expose any info about the battery status etc.
We also have a myEnergi Zappi car charger and I noticed the other evening that we were drawing 3.6 kW from the grid while cooking supper. I checked the LED on the inverter and the battery was 95% full, so don’t understand why we were using power from the grid instead of power from the battery. We are a completely electric home (heating, cooking, hot water etc.) so I would like more control over power usage to try to minimise electricity charges. Are there any third party battery/power managers available for consumers that people could recommend? Or do we need to start from scratch with a “modern” battery/inverter system? Many thanks!
We moved into our current home about 18 months ago and inherited a 4 kW PV system with a Solax SK-SU3700 inverter and 2 * 4.7 kWh Pylon Extra2000 batteries. The system was installed in 2015 by Solar Dawn, who went into administration 2 years later, so it is not maintained. I have tried (unsuccessfully) to register the system with Solax so have no way of monitoring it, apart from a home-grown Python script that scrapes the inverter web interface intermittently and extracts the current/daily/total power gen - AFAIK the inverter does not expose any info about the battery status etc.
We also have a myEnergi Zappi car charger and I noticed the other evening that we were drawing 3.6 kW from the grid while cooking supper. I checked the LED on the inverter and the battery was 95% full, so don’t understand why we were using power from the grid instead of power from the battery. We are a completely electric home (heating, cooking, hot water etc.) so I would like more control over power usage to try to minimise electricity charges. Are there any third party battery/power managers available for consumers that people could recommend? Or do we need to start from scratch with a “modern” battery/inverter system? Many thanks!