Block Energy Monitor

This control element shows where the electricity in the house is coming from at the moment and where it is going – from the photovoltaics, from the grid and from the battery to the consumers. The charts show generation, consumption, grid import and feed-in of the last hours, days or a whole year, if required with the amounts in euros.

Operation

1. Grid: the power at the grid connection in kW. A positive value is import from the grid, a negative one feed-in. The arrow below points to the centre when importing and to the grid when feeding in.
2. Production: the current power of the photovoltaics. From 0.1 kW an arrow points to the centre.
3. Autarky: how many percent of the consumption are not coming from the grid at the moment. The blue ring fills with the value.
4. Consumption: the power the house needs at the moment.
5. Battery: at the top the state of charge in percent, at the bottom Charge, Discharge or Standby, with the power while charging or discharging. The arrow points to the battery while charging and to the centre while discharging. The battery only appears if it is set up.
6. Consumer: up to five individual consumers with their power, for instance a wallbox or a heater rod. They sit in the four corners and – without a battery – at the bottom in the middle. Only the consumers that are set up appear.

The arrows alternate between single and double every half second, so the energy flow can be seen at a glance. A tap on a field opens its chart – grid, production, consumption, autarky or a consumer. The battery has two tap areas: the upper part opens the course of the state of charge, the lower part the charged and discharged energy.

The chart

1. List: switches between the chart and the overview. The overview shows for the selected period Autarky, Production, Consumption, Import and Export with their amount in euros as well as Savings and Yield. The savings are the energy covered by the house itself – consumption minus import – at the import price, the yield is the export at the export price.
2. Summary: the totals of the period for the selected field: for the grid import and export with their amount, for production, consumption and the consumers the energy with its price, for the battery the charged and discharged energy or the minimum and maximum state of charge, for autarky its value and the savings.
3. Chart: one value per hour. While the data are loading, “Please wait...” appears; if there is nothing for the period, “No data available”.
4. – and +: + zooms in horizontally, up to ten times, – zooms out again.
5. Arrows: page back and forward by the selected period, but not beyond today. The number in brackets on the button shows how far back you have paged.
6. Time range: shows the selected period; a tap opens the menu.

The autarky of a period is weighted with the consumption of the individual hours: a night hour without consumption does not count as much as a midday hour with high consumption.

The menu

1. 6 hours to 24 hours: the last hours up to now.
2. Day to 90 days: whole days up to and including today. Year shows the current calendar year.
3. Date: opens the dialog Time range. Start (From) and end (To) are set there, Exit applies the range.
4. Import / Export: the price per kWh for import and feed-in, adjustable from 0 to 100 €. Default 0.20 € for import and 0.10 € for export. All amounts in euros are computed with these prices. The prices and the time range selected last are stored on the respective device and apply there to all energy monitors.
5. Waste bin: after the question “Delete all data?” deletes all recorded data of this energy monitor.
6. Exit: closes the menu.

Setup

This section is meant for the installer of the system.

The control element is linked to the function block Block Energy Monitor. The block computes consumption and autarky and records the values once per hour. First create the function block and assign addresses to its inputs and outputs, then right-click the control element and select the function block. The addresses are taken over in the process. Without a link, a tap on the element points this out. See also the notes under Project statistics.

Important: the control element reads the values from the addresses at the inputs and outputs of the block. If an input is only wired internally to another block and has no address, its display stays at 0. Recording the individual consumers also requires an address at the consumer input.

Older recordings. The recording has been revised. Values from the time before are kept, but appear one hour further to the right in the chart; for the state of charge and the autarky they hold the hourly maximum or the middle of minimum and maximum. An offset is therefore visible at the changeover. In addition, the controller only records the grid import separately from the feed-in since the revision. With older recordings or controllers only the balance of each hour is available, which is split into import and export by its sign – a short import in an hour with feed-in disappears in the export.

Whether the battery is charging or discharging is determined by the parameter Battery mode of the block: either by the sign of the battery power (positive = charge, negative = discharge) or by the input Battery status with the values of the parameters Battery status charge and Battery status discharge.

Parameters

Address links

The addresses come from the link with the function block and need not be entered by hand. Displayed are:

See also General properties of all control elements.