Production, Consumption & Battery State-of-charge Monitoring - Weekly view

                                        SolarEdge provides live monitoring for all of their systems and it is OUTSTANDING!   

 This home's solar production shows in the colorful top graph as above the line, and the homes consumption is shown as below that same line. Power drawn from the utility company is shown in orange and all of the other power has either come directly from the solar array (darker blue) or from the battery (lighter blue). 

 The battery's state-of-charge line graph aligns perfectly with the production/consumption graph above it, and trhe time of day is below.

 This system is set for maximmum self-consumption, meaning that the power stored in the battery during the day will be consumed in the evening before any power is drawn from the grid. Because the energy has been stored in the battery and then drawn directly out of it the 25% net metering discount on excess solar power that has been exported for credits (shown in deep blue above the graph) is avoided, thus saving you money. This snippet is from a very hot week in July and as you can see the AC load chews up the power stored in the battery fairly quickly, thus the need to import power from the grid during the night. If the grid had gone down late at night after all of the battery's power had already been consumed the home would temporarily be out of power. However, as soon as the sun rises the next day the inverter will "wake up" and begin to generate power for the home's consumption and to recharge the battery ...even if the grid is still out! This pattern can go on indefinetly, so even if a severe weather event or hacker attack has taken out the grid for weeks, you'll always have solar power being harvested.

 Now let's assume the array has been continuously covered with snow because of a major storm and you needed more power than the battery had in storage and your backup system has shut down.  Not a problem for you can plug a small portable generator into the SolarEdge Backup system and run it just long enough to recharge your battery. No listening to a generator 24/7 during a blizzard!

 The system can also be easily remotely programmed by way of your cell phone to store-only and it will then only discharge the battery power during a grid outage. Suppose you are enjoying a Caribbean vacation and you hear that a nor'easter has been forecast for New England and you remember that your battery was set for self-consumption when you left home.  No worries, just pull out your cellphone, log into your SolarEdge monitoring, and reset the system to Store-only.      Total security during those savage winter storms!  

 This is the July 6th 2025 monitoring from an existing 8.2 kW roof array that we added battery backup too earlier that year. Please take note of the times-of-day while looking at both the colorful Production/ Consumption graph and the battery state-of-charge line graph below. 

 You can see that this client's array began to harvest solar power at about 5:30 in the morning and that by 9 or so the array was already harvesting ~5 kW of power. Also note that at about 10:30 there was a sharp drop in the harvest, my guess would be that a heavy cloud might have passed through. The array's production begins to fall off at around 14:00 and drops sharply at about 16:00. Two things can be deducted from this afternoon harvest curve; the roof array has a southeastern orientation that favors morning production over afternoon production, and I would guessthat there is a tall treeline that begins to shade the roof beginning at around 15:00.

 The batteries State-of-charge graph shows that the house didn't use up all of the power stored in it the previous day and that as the array was beginning to wake up at 5:30 it still had some power available to give to the home. The battery will always hold the last 20% in reserve to power the inverter wakeup functions, and with this in mind at 5:30 there was still about 30% available for the home's consumptions. If you look over to the right you can see that on the evening of July 6th all of the batteries power had been consumed by the house loads (most likely AC) and power was then beginning to be drawn for the grid (orange shading). This grid consumption would still have no cost for the client because he will have no doubt built up a significant credit with the utilites through the exported excess midday solar production (deep bright blue shading) ...but keep in mind the the utilites are allowed to keep 25% of the value of that exported solar production, whereas the power consumed from the battery does not carry that net metering discount cost. In effect a battery will "stretch" your solar array's capability and when set for self consumption saves you money!

The battery begins to recharge in earnest at about 7:30 and by a little before 10 AM it is already fully charged. It begins to give power back to the house just after 16:00 and by 21:30 or so all 8 usable kWh have been directly self-consumed in the house (again, probably by AC loads).

 Do you find this a bit fascinating? Most do for there is a little "geek" in almost all of us. There is however real value to be found in this SolarEdge production/consumption monitoring. In this case the monitoring for this day proves that the client would benefit greatly with the addition of a second 10 kWh battery. More of the midday power would be stored directly and his system probably wouldn't begin to export until after noon, thus avoiding a significant amount of the 25% net metering discount. In addition the home would have had the benefit of direct self-consumption much later into the night and drawn far less utility power.  Lastly, the addition of an extra battery would give the home far greater capability during grid outages.  It's a win, Win, WIN!