Installing Solar Panels to Generate Grid-fed Electricity

Not long ago, we took advantage of the various NSW government rebates plus the massive 66c/kWh EnergyAustralia feed-in tariff, and had solar panels installed on the roof of our house by Andrew Hanna Electrical. The specs of our system are as follows:

CMS-2000 Inverter

During the installation, they’ve kindly put a Cat5 cable through the house for the RS-232 serial connection from the PV inverter to the computer. The CMS-2000 is basically a re-badged Solar Energy Australia “Orion” grid feed inverter, which comes with monitoring software “Pro Control” to log data from the inverter. Armed with this software, we can now pull some interesting data to see how much energy we generate at various times throughout the day.

Solar Panels

The only problem is, it doesn’t make sense to have a computer switched on 24×7 just to monitor the inverter box – it’d be a massive waste of energy. So the fun begins when I want to monitor the solar inverter from a low-power, embedded computer which is actually a QNAP TS-109 NAS running my favourite Debian linux. More on this in upcoming posts.

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categories Hardware | | datetime 8 Jul 2010 16:48

  • Ben

    I to have a CMS-2000 inverter, as I have no knowledge of programming appreciate advice where I can purchase a debian box or something similar , I only use my computer once a day for a few minutes and do not want to leave the PC on just to record the Inverter output. Just looking for something simple, not to expensive and that works without spending days getting it to work.

  • http://www.edmundtse.com/ Edmund Tse

    What I’m using now is a QNAP network attached storage device, which is basically an external hard disk enclosure that is designed to work over network rather than over USB.

    I chose this NAS device specifically because it supports overwriting the manufacturer firmware to run Debian Linux natively. But because it doesn’t have a serial port, I had to use a USB to serial adapter.

    If you’re not into hacking hardware, then I would suggest that you use an old laptop, and just put any operating system you like on it. If by chance you have a laptop old enough that it has a built-in serial port, that’d be awesome.

    Power usage for my NAS is around 15-20W, which is similar to the power usage of a dual core laptop. In fact, a Intel Pentium M laptop or an Intel Atom Netbook are both likely to use less than 10W with the LCD display turned off. Whichever laptop you choose, it’ll definitely use less power than your desktop (over 100W)

    Let me know how you go with setting it up!

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