SolarEdge system Credit vs Debit info on Monthly Report Question

Tariffs
#1

I have two SolarEdge Inverters with a Wattnode meter connected to me electrical panel. On the SolarEdge site I can see generation, self consumption, and import data. I have setup two SolarEdge devices in my system one for Solar and the second for Consumption and I am getting data, but on my first month report there are colums for credit and debit. The credit amounts are very large, much more then I expect is accuarte, and the debit colum is all 0’s.

I think I have something misconfigured, but I am not sure how those numbers are configured. I assume its in the rates and tarrifs, but I dont know where this data is pulled from.

Can anyone offer some guidence on my setup, I am a home residence in Northern Virginia with Dominion as my local power company if that helps.

Thanks
Dennis

#2

The system will need to have tariffs entered, currently it is empty.

https://pvoutput.org/help.html#tariffs

#3

How do I know what my credit and debit rates are? In northern Virginia the local power company (Dominion) provides Net Metering with residential solar, For the Export and Import model I think I set my system for Net Daily, but I am guess at alot of this.

If anyone has this working in NOVA, provide some guidence, I would be grateful.

#4

You should find the local tariffs on the Dominion website. You may have to search a little for it. I am in Southern California and found it on my electrical power provider’s home page at the bottom. I have checked and my querries got me here:
https://www.dominionenergy.com/home-and-small-business/rates-and-regulation/va-electric-rates-dominion-energy
Good luck finding the info.

#5

I think I found them here:

Now I am just trying to figure out how the export power is calculated. To me it seems like its showing much more exported power then there should be. My consumption meter is connected to my circuit panel with the CT’s connected to the street power phases, I have two inverters connected to the circut panel as well with one inverter on each phase.

But when I look at my Generated and Exported numbers, they almost match, and I expect my home would be using more power, so to me I would expect that my Export would be less.

#6

The CT’s connected to your Main Power will show your NET usage. If that value is + you are drawing power from the grid otherwise when - you are sending power to the Grid. Your consumption will be the difference between the Net and the Generated power from your PV system. The equation is:
NET = Consumption + Solar
You measure Net and Solar and calculate the Consumption by subtracting Solar from Net. So you need to tell PVOutput that you are sending them Net and Solar.
If you are indeed using two single phase inverters you will need to send both outputs to PVOutput. You can do this by setting up the second device for the second inverter. @bankstownbloke should be able to help you get it set up correctly.
I also have split phase or two phase power but only I have one inverter which is also two phase AC output. I was surprised that you had two single phase inverters which to me seems odd. I have an SE7600 which I know has two phase output so you also probably have both inverters feeding both phases together on separate breakers.

#7

Just to clarify, I have a SE7600 and a SE5000. Both are configured to upload to Solaredge portal which is where PVOutput pulls from so they should be getting full data. I have the Wattnode connected to the panel and the RS485 port of the SE5000. This feeds info to the inverter which then uploads to the solaredge portal. The solaredge portal looks good to me, take a look at the public site.

https://monitoringpublic.solaredge.com/solaredge-web/p/site/public?name=StetterSolar#/dashboard

On the Solaredge portal the Generation and Import look good, but the Self Consumption is hard to understand as there is self consumption on both the import and the geneation side.

I wonder if that is skewing the data on the PVOutput side, if PVOutput is only considering self consumption on the generation side, that could explain why it shows so much Export data as it thinks I am not using any of that generated power.

So to answer your question about using the my inverters each setup as single phase inverters, how would I determine that? Each inverter has a single dedicated breaker in my circuit panel. The SE7600 breaker is on one phase, while the SE5000 is on the other. I just assumed each inverter powers the specific phase. There is no breakout box or other connection between the inverters and the circuit panel.

Right now I have the automatic uploads configured with the primary device being the Solaredge Portal set for a direction of Solar and a secondary device being the Solar Edge portal set for Consumption. Since PVOutput is pulling the combined data from both inverters, I dont think I need to add the seocnd inverter as the overall is already there, take a look at my system.

#8

I agree your system looks like it is performing correctly. I have looked at your Watnode meter specifications and I believe it is reporting your Solar Production only that is why PVOutput is assuming that all your production is being exported. In other words you don’t have a measurement of your NET power. In order to determine the NET power for your home you will have to have two CT’s installed in your main breaker panel just before your main breaker. With this arrangement you will see both Net power and Solar production power. The difference in these two measurements is the self consumption power.
Assuming that your inverters are two phase you will see a couple of breakers at the bottom of your panel connected to two wires from your inverter output. One of the breakers is connected to the Phase A buss bar and the other to the Phase B buss bar. They should look something like this:

image.jpg424×703 145 KB

The bottom wire (red) is phase B from Solar and the black lead is Phase A from Solar. These two breakers are on different phases. Two CT’s with black and white leads are connected to the wires and lead to my current measuring device. The Net measuring CT’s are connected at the top of the panel on the main leads from the street. The other two breakers are for voltage sensing leads small red, blue and black wires. My device is a Neurio which measures the Net and Solar power for my system as well as the solar power. This allows me to determine the power parameters for each phase as well as the total.
If the outputs of the two inverters are both wired into the same panel you should see two sets of wires and two sets of breakers inside your main panel. It is possible also that the two outputs are combined in your system before the power if fed to the main panel. In this case only one set of wires will be connected to breakers in your main panel.

Here is my setup with four CT’s:

image.png2082×1279 105 KB

CT’s 1 and 2 are on the power feed from the street, CT’s 3 and 4 are on the Solar feed as shown above. This diagram shows how the four CT’s produce the Net power, Solar Generation and Consumption. Phase A consumption is determined by combining CT1 and CT4, Phase B consumption by combining CT2 and CT3. Net is determined by summing CT1 and CT2, Generation by summing CT3 and CT4 and total consumption by summing all four CT’s. I have a sixth channel which is have set to the difference in consumption of the two phases called Submeter.
The problem I see with your setup is that you would need another Watnode meter to attach to your mains from the street or to you house loads. SolarEdge would have to advise you on how to do that.

I checked the rate schedule and see the date is for 2015. I am sure they are higher in 2018. You will need to find a current rate schedule. I know your power is cheaper than in So. CAL because ours is about $0.28 per kWh for the first 350 kWh. Here is what I found
Customer type System size Electricity rate schedule (2017)
Residential 20 kW or less June-September: $0.11049/kWh
October-May: $0.09557/kWh

#9

Okay so my connection is much different.

Here is the Inverters connected to my circuit panel:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/mVGkJ1xhAsq2PDQC3

The two circuit breakers at the bottom run to the SE7600 and SE5000 respectivly.

My Wattnode has 2 - CT’s connected to my power lines comming in from the power company, you can see them at the top of the panel, so that way I can measure the power I am importing from the electric company, and also measure power I am exporting to the grid.

I think you are right on with rates, I ended up using .11 cents as my debit and credit rates across the board for now, I need to figure out if there is an easy way to configure PVOutput for seasonl changes to the Tariffs.

I am still stuck trying to figure out why PVOutput thinks I am exporting so much power. I am open to trying any settings to get it correct. I still think that it may be somthing with the Automatic Uploads on my primary device where the Direction has 4 options. (Solar, Net, Both, Consumption). I know its not consumption, and it is now set for Solar and with that the Export is high, so maybe Net or Both? I just dont know if that is the issue.

If I set it for Both, do I need to define a Secondary Device as a Consumption device, which is how I have it setup now?

Some more pics:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/EJgDFZFsQwhJPIIH2

https://photos.app.goo.gl/em12ITSSnmgTrcU33

https://photos.app.goo.gl/5PIIQUXcutKjXn4J3

#10

Images were to big, here they are compressed:

https://ibb.co/irCw5o
https://ibb.co/i2vSBT
https://ibb.co/mXtfWT
https://ibb.co/hVRZrT
https://ibb.co/chWZrT
https://ibb.co/g3d3ko
https://ibb.co/fafG5o
https://ibb.co/cTDm5o
https://ibb.co/jc72d8

#11

I just realized, the public portal on the Solaredge site does not show consumption only generation. Here is what Solaredge is showing for the month of May. You can see that the Consumption there seems more accurate.

https://ibb.co/hnczrT

#12

Congratulations! You system is really excellent in performance. The blue portions are equal the left shows the percentage of self consumption of your production is 376.89 kWhs and you had a net export of energy of 332 kWh and this is only the first 23 days of the month.
You should be able to get this exact information to PVOutput. You may need to have someone write an API for you which will do the job. That is what I had to do since my Net meter device, Neurio, is not integrated with my SolarEdge monitor site.
Right now all you are sending to PVOutput is your production. I see that is because you are using the Public version of the portal and you should be using the private one. That may also be the reason you are seeing the stepped data which is 15 minute intervals instead of 5 minutes.

#13

Okay so reading through the help, I found this:

Direction

The selected direction controls if the data is allocated to solar generation, energy consumption or net data.

Solar - Record all the data from the device as energy and power generated.
Consumption - Record all the data from the device as energy and power used.
Net - Record all the data from the device as Net power. DONATION MODE
Both - Record both consumption and generation. Only applicable for the smappee device. DONATION MODE
The Net direction treats positive values as power import and negative values as power export.

A device recording net data must also upload generation data. The Net Delay setting under the Advanced Settings section should also be configured to ensure generation data is processed before Net data.

I was configured with the primary device as Solar, and a secondary device as Consumption. Looking back over the past month, the first thing I notcied is that the numbers are all off. Even generation is off by a few Kwh every day, and all other numbers are off as well. Its pulling the data from the Solaredge webportal, so I dont understand why the descrepency, unless the secondary device is skewing the data.

So now I removed the secondary device and configured it as Net and set the Net Delay to 15 minutes. I read somewhere that the Solaredge portal with FIOS triggers a block if you poll to often, so to make sure I dont flag any blocks, lets see if this works.

I cant be the only one who did this, hopefully someone with a simialr setup will chime in. Iwsmiser, thanks for trying to help out.

#14

Your primary device should be SOLAR and the secondary device should be NET because that is what is being measured by your CT’s.
I have the SE7600A SolarEdge inverter and it does fine with 5 minute polling. I noticed that you have the SE5000D on your smaller array. This is the newest type of inverter which has less magnetics and more electronics and is much lighter and smaller. I don’t know about its polling rate limitations.
If your new settings work try the 5 minute polling and see if that works also. It gives you a nice curve than the 15 minute.

#15

Okay making the change now.

Will give it 24 hours and see if its more accurate.

The limitation I mentioned is something I remember reading, it is with my ISP Verizon FIOS, it was triggering a block from them. I think I read about it in the PVOutput app or something, I have to go back and find it. I will try 5 minutes, and see if it causes any issues.

#16

Sounds like a plan.
Just a thought…since your device does both consumption and generation you might want to try “both”. If you check with @bankstownbloke and let him know that your WattNode Modbus does both Consumption and Generation he should be able to advise you on this setting.

#17

Yea I saw that, but it says “Only applicable for the smappee device” so I am not sure what that means. Once I made the switch to the Automatic Uploads everything looks messed up, so I will give it some time to see if it levels out.

Fingers Crossed.

#18

I believe that is because that is the one device that is supported by the API that supplies both values. Since your device also supplies both it should be included in the API and it might just work. If not @bankstownbloke could make it happen if informed.

#19

Alright, well Primary set to Solar and Secondary set to Net really messes things up. Consumption numbers get way screwed up.

https://ibb.co/eAyv38

I think I am going to try to remove the secondary device and set the primary to both, since both the generation and consumption are tracked on the SOleredge portal, lets see what that does.

#20

It’s worth a try. If that doesn’t work…from what I see your device logs NET and Solar. One should be primary and the other Secondary but I am not sure which is which. You need to get your usage from the electric company’s site. I have access to the electric company data and I compare it with the results from my Neurio device and from the data that the SolarEdge inverter sends to PVOutput and the PVOutput results as well. The way I have setup my PVOutput shows excellent agreement among the three measurements…within +/- 1% Here is an example: Red and Blue = Solar, Yellow and White are Consumption and Green and Orange are NET.

image.png1221×1146 128 KB

This is 5 minute data and the units are kWh/5 minutes. There are some differences in peak values but overall it is consistent.
I use the Power Company’s data in combination with the SolarEdge data to get one set of curves and the other set is from the Neurio which is measuring NET and Solar.