Following the recent outage of PVOUTPUT I pondered catching up the missing data. I use the Pvoutput Integration Service (PVIS for short) and my data comes from a Current Cost envi monitor via a serial port.
There is an explanation how to do this in the documentation, but me being a bit short on the neurons It took me ages to sort it.
I looked at the CSV file which is output by the PVIS on my laptop and found it collects data every minute. Hmmm - the pvupload service is looking for data every 5 minutes so I needed to get rid of the odd minutes keeping the 5 minute ones only. I did this using a spreadsheet formula but now have tested without doing this - ie just shoving every 1 minute record up the pipe to PVOUTPUT and brill it sorts it out rejecting the odd minutes accepting the nearest to the 5 minute interval so this stage is unnecesary.
My next issue was the format for time - PVOUTPUT wants HH.MM but the CC output file from PVIS adds seconds as well - another spreadsheet formula to get rid of the seconds. I thought I would try seeing if PVOUTPUT would accept the seconds “as is” and hey presto it didn’t object - it just ignores the seconds part of the time format.
All-in-all its a piece of cake. Select and copy the time range you want to update from the PVIS created csv file called CC0-24-12-10.log or whatever log file date you need, having opened it with notepad.
Log into PVOUTPUT go to “add output” select the date at the top and ensure you are pointing at the right system if you have more than 1. Scroll down and click “live loader” select semi-colon as separator, energy values “each interval” “time” - position 2 “power consumption” position 5, “temperature” position 3. Note: depending what you are uploading this may differ from my system (just my gas consumption) but just match the fields to the file copy you made - if you paste the copied data immediately you can see the various fields which helps you to select the right field numbers. Press LOAD and off it goes PVOUTPUT rejects the odd minute records and only accepts 1 every 5 minutes. Job done. Hope this helps someone whatever their neuron count.
UPDATE - I tried to update a days data and found that by including the 1 minute interval records for PVOUTPUT to strip out, I exceeded the maximun 288 record count for a day. This is a bit annoying as once PVOUTPUT has stripped out the odd minutes records the total for the day will be 288 (ie 24 x 12) If only PVOUTPUT could allow for this life would be so easy, as it was I had to copy and paste and update in chunks of 4 hours to get the days data updated. Also, i noticed an undocumented behaviour - I was trying to update records for 12th Dec 24 but inadvertantly chose the cc file for 12th November 24 (ythat lack of neurons again). I put 12 dec in the date field and updated data with 12 nov in the data stream field. I expected PVOUTPUT would ignore the date in the data (its not listed as a field in the update choices) and just put my November data into the 12th December records. It did not - no warning about dates not matching but no data was uploaded. Good to know of course as I didn’t want the November data in the december records, but it was an unexpected result. Unless I did something else wrong of course. Overall this method of catchup using the “add output” tab is not an easy method to use - if only someone could come up with a bit of software to do it seamlessly??? I am not an IT man so it won’t be me.