Standard Solis inverter, how does monitoring work?

Charlie-Bravo

Hi all, been reading this forum for....years. finally looking at going with an East West split without any battery. So the installer is proposing a Solis 4G inverter with a 4kW system.

Just wondering how the straight inverter monitors exporting to the grid, or if it can? Does anyone have one that can explain if this function is available on a straight Solis inverter?

Or even, how does a hybrid inverter manage to log the exporting to the grid with the cloud app?

graememk

In standard config, a Inverter does not know what goes to the grid at all, it just produces power.

you can get a CT for it for export limiting functions. not sure if it shows up in the app at all.

A hybrid has to monitor the grid, for it to allow it to balance the battery discharge/charge when there is solar excess

Charlie-Bravo

Cheers for that... So in part, having a hybrid inverter is beneficial, then you could later add batteries!

ECO_Mental

I have a straight 6kW Solis inverter and its doesn't monitor what you export only what you generate. In the end up I went down the Home Assistant route and got myself a couple of ShellyEM's that I use to log energy usage. These are installed in your main fuse board and use CT clamps, easy to do but you have to be careful and power down the board fully before you start.... The shellyEM even has a channel that logs negative current so you can put this on your main ESBN incomer and anything that goes back to the grid is shown as a negative. The frequency of the readings in the Solis also are like only every 4/5 minutes so if you want live readings you have to do something like this anyway.

A few of the lads here are able to read the inverter directly but there is some technical setup in doing this. Check out the Solar PV automation thread.

Charlie-Bravo

That's quite useful info @ECO_Mental thanks for that.