Once you have your solar photovoltaic panels in place on your rooftop,
how do you know how well they are performing? Maybe you’re lucky and
you have net metering where you are, so you can sort of guess at it
because your electrical bills are lower than they were. But it would be
useful if you could get more information so you knew how much you were
producing and how much you were using.
Fat
Spaniel is an amusingly named company (with an overweight corporate
mascot) which offers monitoring services
for building power systems, particularly PV. They "provide hosted
data monitoring, management and control services that OEMs, installers,
and distributed utilities can use to optimize performance and ensure
investment returns for all types of renewable energy systems." And, as
a third party, they can help verify system performance to an owner,
rather than relying on the manufacturer’s claims about what the system
will do.
Fat Spaniel monitoring shows both immediate and historical data from a
power system. Owners, users, and the merely curious can see how much
power a building is using, and how much of that is coming from a
renewable system. The monitoring system shows both building demand as
well as energy output by the generating system.
Power monitoring and display information can be beneficial in green
building where it can help gain an additional point toward LEED
certification. And state grants to encourage the installation of
renewable power systems also sometimes require a monitoring and display
component as a precondition for awarding the grant.
link: Fat Spaniel
Technologies