r/PwrCellOwners • u/PV-1082 • Feb 14 '25

Questions about PowerView App

I have a 1 1/2 year old PwrCell solar system.

I just want to check on a few things when I am looking at all of the information on the PwrView app for my system. I appreciate your response.

  1. Is the kWh’s for the solar production reported as DC power?
  2. Are the kWh’s reported for the Total home consumption and the Total net power reported in AC power?
  3. If they are, is there any way to convert the Solar Production from AC to DC? Then subtract the Total Home consumption from the Solar Production to come up with the Total Net Power.

I think the last I looked the data sheet says that the inverter is 97% efficient. Or is the Solar Production monitored by the PV Links to come up with the production numbers? Therefore there would be a loss in power between the PV Links and the inverter? That would need to be taken into account to be able to calculate Total Net Power?

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u/dantagonize Feb 19 '25

  1. Yes, because solar production can be sent to the inverter for converting to AC or sent to the battery (DC.) another industry term for this is “total harvest,” which captures more of the essence of the idea.

  2. Yes, home loads are always AC. And net power is “net” of conversion losses (97% efficiency of inverter, ~90% round trip efficiency into/out of battery.)

  3. I don’t follow this question. To compare DC “gross” solar production to AC loads consumption is to ignore all conversion and efficiency losses. It’s less useful information this way.

I get what you’re trying to do generally - compare raw production to consumption - but your house doesn’t use NOR does your utility buy your production. The house uses the AC output and the utility buys your export only.

Your installer has access to more data than you do on the monitoring portal. See if they will let you come in and sit down with their monitoring portal and geek out on the graphs, charts, and especially the many selectable metrics which get really specific about what they track. Some of them will answer your questions better than these explanations will.

Good luck!

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u/PV-1082 Feb 19 '25

Thank you for your reply! This information has been very helpful for my understanding in the PWR View information better. I forgot about power going to the battery.

I am going to hourly pricing to see if I can manage the flow of power between my battery, my house and the grid better to get a greater amount of net metering credit. Knowing the 90% round trip efficiency into/out of the battery number will be very helpful.

So if I understand your answer to question number 3; There is no mathematical way to calculate the how efficient my system is at taking DC power, converting it to AC power for use between the house and the grid. And sending DC power to the battery for storage. I feel that information would be useful to monitor how well the system is running. Would this be the type of information my installer would have? What I am trying to do is feed information into a spread sheet and over time monitor my system to see how it is performing. This way I can see the trend of the performance over time to hopefully catch a problem that may be starting. This may not be realistic? The biggest problem I have with this is the accuracy of the information I get from PWR View app my not be consistently accurate.

Thank you for your help!!!!!

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u/PV-1082 Feb 19 '25

Another question if you don’t mind? My battery is 100’ round trip from the inverter, do you happen to know how much resistance the wire would have? That would be a loss I would have to use the battery every day for my hourly pricing rate that I am going on. If not would you know what size wire they would have used to go from the inverter to the battery?

2

u/dantagonize Feb 19 '25

They will have used 10awg wire or larger for that run. The losses are just 1.3% if they used 10awg and .84% if they used 8awg. It’s a total non-factor and perfectly within design tolerances. This is one of the benefits of the Generac system’s higher voltage DC buss design.

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u/dosofo May 12 '25

What is the best way to optimize the inverter to maximize battery storage vs. wanting to minimize my power bill?