I have some solar panels in the house, and I can monitor their production and the house’s consumptions in the vendors App. However, I’m looking for ways to monitor these indicators on Smartthings so that I can integrate with other Scenes.
I was looking for devices and I stumbled accross the Aeotec Home Energy Meter Gen5 - https://amzn.eu/d/epKuDMl. I was wondering if anyone in this community has this setup and can share some feedback/screenshots to see what can you do on Smartthings with this device and the type of things I can check for during scenes.
If you use any other device for this effect and you’re satisfied with it, feel free to recommend it.
I don’t think that device is what you think it is. It just measures the energy draw on a specific circuit branch. So the total use of the devices you have plugged in. It doesn’t measure energy production or anything like that. It’s a popular device for measuring energy consumption over time, but I haven’t heard of anybody using it with a solar system.
What brand is your solar energy system? At our house, we have Tesla and both companies just announced a couple of months ago that they are going to add more integration between SmartThings and Tesla, which will be nice. But it’s not a general purpose feature, it’s going to be specific to that brand.
There are quite a few people in the community who do have solar energy systems, so hopefully some of them will chime in with what they’re using for SmartThings integration, if anything.
As far as I know the clamps measure electricity flow. I looked at that device because the clamps are similar to the device I have at home provided by the solar panel vendor. I’m based in Europe so I don’t think the brand would ring any bells.
The one the vendors installed have two clamps. One installed on the wires that come into the house, and this measures how much I’m receiving from the network, and the other installed on the wires that the panels are using to inject electricity on the house.
Also, here Aeotec mentions that this device can also be used for Solar energy measuring purposes.
For the specific purpose of measuring when you are feeding power out to the grid, but that’s only one of several measurements that most solar systems give you.
For example, mine shows me how much the panels are generating, how much the house is using, how much we are feeding back to the grid, How much we are drawing from the storage battery, and how much we are using to charge the battery.
It also shows the total amount generated for the day and what percentage of total use was self generated.
So five measurements and two calculations.
If all you’re looking for is something To tell you when you have more solar power coming in then you are using right at the moment so that you can turn something else on, like maybe a washer you’ve had waiting, yes, you could use the aeotec for that. Setting up the automation might be a little tricky, since as soon as you turn on an additional something in your house, the amount of energy going out is going to drop. But if you specify the range, you could certainly trigger something to start when it hit a certain point.
You might be surprised: we have quite a few European members in the community and I’m one of those engineers who spends my spare time reading technical manuals, and I tend to remember most of what I read.
Anyway, the first rule of Home Automation always applies: “the model number matters.“
Different systems will offer different integration possibilities, so it’s always good to be specific when you’re asking the community for ideas.
The solar panels are of some local brand, not a multi national corporation. What I can see at the moment is the device that they setup for monitoring which is an “Enphase IQ Gateway Metered”. I don’t have logical access to this device, I can only monitor the production/consumption on the App of the brand that sold me the panels and they are a Utility company.
Regarding your previous message, the measurements that you’ve mentioned make sense, and I believe that a 2 phase monitoring device would be able to do the trick, except monitoring what is being used to charge the batteries, but since I dont have any, it isn’t important to me.
