Solar Energy Year!

[jasonacox]

I love seeing the full year of data on solar production at a glance. In Los Angeles, we continue to have mostly cloudy days, but you can definitely tell we are headed into Spring (March 20 is the first day!).

Here is my 8.5kW system over the past 12 months:

My plans this year are to decrease our home energy usage to fit better within the solar production footprint.

How is your system doing? Post your Solar Energy Year so we can all celebrate with you! 😀

[mcbirse]

Cool idea - is that 24 months or 12 months though for your Power Meters? (or is the 24 months a typo?)

Here is my 10kW system with 1x Powerwall over the past year (Australia/Sydney location):

Never thought to check this really, nice to see my Net Grid Usage. Winning. 😁

[jasonacox]

Typo! 😊

So cool!!! Love to see that @mcbirse !! You are supplying nearly 6 MWh to your neighbors and you pulled less than a MWh for your own use... super green! I'm going to try to follow you on your home usage metrics. 😉

[mcbirse]

So my figures were for a non-EV household.

However, I imagine that will be last time I will see such a great Net Grid Usage. I just picked up a Polestar 2 a few weeks ago, so my excess solar will now go to that instead of the grid. Still super green - no more burning petrol...!

[jasonacox]

100%!!!! How do you like the Polestar? They look gorgeous.

[mcbirse]

Awesome car, very happy! 😀

Agreed they look amazing - here it is just after getting ceramic coated and window tinting. It will probably never look that clean again, haha.

[dkerr64]

Before I installed Powerwall-Dashboard I was downloading data monthly and importing into Excel and creating the below graph. I have not started to investigate but I imagine this would be pretty easy to recreate with Grafana.

What I like about this is that I am using a 30-day moving average to smooth out the daily fluctuations so I can quickly see when, on average, I generate more than I use (sholder seasons) and when I use more than I generate (winter when sun is low in the sky, summer when I am running air conditioning).

Once I had a full year of data I added in a 365-day moving average which clearly shows that I am generating just a little bit more than I use, on average, over a full year... and you can see that this is improving over time (I think mainly because we did a lot of post-covid travel in 2022 thus reducing our consumption)

I later added in a calendar month average (the green horizontals) which helps me compare to same month a year ago.

[ThePnuts]

@jasonacox Well... its not what you think, I used the first example and then I turned it into a dashed line and figured out the width and all that and made it work using that. How ever, thanks to the time shift of a new day, it broke. workaround could be forcing this by month so the date doesnt shift each day, but I was working a different angle that I just got to tired on.

The other angle I have just forcing the date for 15 days for each month with the monthly average value. Here is the code for the 2nd attempt that is starting towards what I mentioned above. Its already shifting the data back 15 days so it can be centered on the month, I just need a loop in there or something to make it do how ever many days I want the line to be.

import "timezone"
import "date"

option location = timezone.location(name: "America/Los_Angeles")

from(bucket: "tesla_energy")
  |> range(start: v.timeRangeStart, stop: v.timeRangeStop)
  |> filter(fn: (r) => r["_measurement"] == "kwh")
  |> filter(fn: (r) => r["_field"] == "solar")
  |> aggregateWindow(every: 1d, fn: sum, createEmpty: false)
  |> aggregateWindow(every: 1mo, fn: mean, createEmpty: false)
  |> map(fn: (r) => ({r with _field: "Monthly Average"}))
  |> map(fn: (r) => ({r with _time: date.sub(d: 15d, from: r._time)}))

[dkerr64]

@ThePnuts sorry but I am not familiar enough with Grafana to know how to take your example above and add it to my chart. For example using the simply editor I cannot add both a sum() and a mean() aggregation... if I try and add mean it replaces sum. Could you export the JSON for me please?

Thanks

[ThePnuts]

Yup, here ya go
Year view-1679862032046.json.zip

Can you do sql queries against Influxdb 1.8? could you do like a nested query first selecting for the day average, then take that to make the monthly average?

[dkerr64]

@ThePnuts are you pulling the data from a different db? I only have the standard Powerwall-Dashboard install and even importing your json does not get the horizontal lines? I must be missing something?

[ThePnuts]

@dkerr64 I am terribly sorry, when I responded it was late and I thought I was responding to Jason. I am not on the standard Powerwall-Dashboard. Long story short, I am using the latest version of influxdb 2+ which is not directly compatible to this project as it is. So I have been re-writing all of the queries from influxql to flux. I did the same to the query Jason shared and then expanded on it to include the monthly average like on your spreadsheet example.

Im not sure you could use my flux code with influx 1.8. Instead of bucket and measurement you would use something like powerwall/kWh but I really do not know sql much.

[ThePnuts]

Oooh nice. I didn't get PTO until the end of September, so anything before that was limited to usage/pw refill. Looking forward to my first full year.

11.2 kW system with 1 powerwall, Sacramento, CA area.

Still waiting for my first net negative week.

[jasonacox]

That's awesome @ThePnuts ! With a 11.2kW system, you're going to catch up quick this summer. I bet that home usage spike in September was a hard working A/C fighting back our lovely California heat? 😅 I can relate. On my agenda for this year is to invest in a more efficient HVAC system.

[ThePnuts]

Oh yeah, gotta love the heat and its only increasing each year. I'm way way on the outskirts of Sac in more of a desert area, so we roll 95-105 from August to early October. I think that spike in September was about a week of 110-113.

We did a new HVAC 2 years ago, but I should have looked into it a lot more in preparation of solar. Hindsight I would have done a either a heat pump for the central air or a mini split system. I am still tempted to look into the mini split later since the primary rooms we use are on the same side of the house, an ideal situation for it. Right now my heat is on gas and we have cold winters.

[jasonacox]

so we roll 95-105 from August to early October. I think that spike in September was about a week of 110-113.

Yikes! I started looking at the high-efficiency HVAC units with a variable-speed compressors. Not cheap, but the math works out over time and I'm itching to get my "100% Solar Power" badge... or at least a bit closer to what @mcbirse has. 🥇 😉

[jgleigh]

16.3 kW system in Arizona.

[dkerr64]

WOW! you sure do get a lot of sunshine in Arizona.

[jasonacox]

Wow is right! Amazing @dkerr64 !

[cwagz]

Here is my year on our 12.3kW system. I was mining ethereum (about 900 watts continuous) up until it wasn't possible anymore in September 2022. I expect my usage to be less in 2023. I am really happy with how the system has worked out. We had a credit of -$41 on our first 12-month true up bill that just came last week.

I also received $120 from Tesla for power we sold during the 8 Virtual Power Plant events in 2022.

[jasonacox]

Awesome! Looks great @cwagz! Before getting PTO, I had miners fire up to chew on all the excess solar power we couldn't push to the grid. I would just cringe to see the powerwalls at 100% and the inverter throttled down from 6kW to 1kW for home use only. 😁

[jgleigh]

April is fun!