Interesthingly

In July I wrote the first post about how to setup the energy dashboard, and after a few bugs were worked out with the energy monitoring device, I’m happy to report we’ve had several months of reliable data collection and reporting!

Meter Connection Issues

As is usually my luck, right after that first post the Rainforest Automation Eagle 3 stopped working. The connection to the meter stopped working the morning of July 19th, as you can see in the monthly graph above. I was starting to have doubts if this was going to be as reliable as I was hoping. I contacted Rainforest and they got it working briefly again near the end of the month, but it lasted only a day. Contacted and fixed again, and it worked August 1st to September 10th. I wrote in a 3rd time, describing the repeat issues and they wrote back that their developers were looking into it. This is not mission critical to me, so I was patient and hopeful for a permanent fix. I suppose after working in technical support myself for years, I definitely understand assisting customers with things that need fixing from another department. After about a week, they pushed a new software release and updated my device and wrote back a nice apologetic email. Since that that September 20th software release, it has been perfectly stable!

Great job Rainforest Automation – from the support team to the development team! And I hope after praising you I didn’t just jinx myself and start the next round of problems…

Data is Beautiful

With the energy dashboard working as expected, I’ve been able to check out the data and our usage by the hour, day, week, month, quarter and year now and see how our solar and energy usage fluctuates. Now begins the next task in seeing about reducing energy usage further, and also working with our solar installer to right-size the solar array. Whether it was a good idea or not, one reason we picked our solar installer was that they guaranteed a certain amount of energy production for the first 10 years – and this first year looks like we’ll be about 11-12% short of the guarantee. Maybe a future article – how the installer will remedy this production shortfall, and whether it was worth it.

For now, we get to look at pretty graphs.