Setting Up a Raspberry Pi Web Kiosk
We have a solar system and I wanted to keep an eye on our relative energy consumption and generation during the day. The SolarEdge inverter that we use has an app (iOS and Android) available plus a web dashboard (Figure 1).
The problem with all of these monitoring applications is that they don’t automatically refresh. I figured there must be a Linux/Raspberry Pi solution, that I can neatly package up. It turns out there is!
In Figure 1, red is electricity purchased from the grid (consumption), blue is energy generated by solar and used by us (self consumption), and green is electricity exported to the grid (production).
The Solar System
Just for background, our solar system generation capacity is 6.48kW. We have eighteen LG Neon 360W Panels and a SolarEdge SE5K Inverter with the MODBUS option (which gives you funky real time monitoring via the web or on an app). Our panels are oversized for the inverter, which maxes out at 5kW. With the SolarEdge inverter, you can see the performance of each panel in realtime. We have 3 phase power to the house, so there are in fact 3 inverters.