According to this nifty little press release, Fat Spaniel and EnerWorks have just partnered to bring great solar-monitoring software to the world of industrial solar hot water. Fat Spaniel is a cool company -- they make software that you can hook up to your solar installation and check on your energy production on the web. It keeps historical data and lets you do real-time monitoring of systems that are far away.
You wouldn't think that was particularly unique -- using computers to monitor your renewable energy setup -- but it really is. We have a little auxiliary piece of equipment (the OutBack Mate) that lets us see what our system is doing, and it's connected to our charge controller via a very long ethernet cable. Ours is strung up to the office, so we can check our battery levels and power generation from our desks. It even has a serial port (so 1994!) so that we can plug it into our computers, but we haven't bothered (yet).
Enerworks (the other company in the above press release) focuses on solar-hot-water systems for commercial applications -- hotels, hospitals, etc. That is totally spiffy, because solar-hot-water systems tend to pay for themselves pretty quickly and are a lot easier to understand (sun! it makes things hot!) than photovoltaic systems.
In other news! Xantrex also released a solar-system monitor this week! And it's Wi-Fi! It's pretty odd to me that the manufacturers of solar products are so slow to realize that all of their customers are geeks -- we want to know how many kilowatt-hours we produced! We want to see our current amperage! We want to see them both in colorful charts and graphs!
Not that we have any amperage here. We are in the midst of yet another snowstorm. It is the first day of spring! As the Yarn Harlot says, "There can only be so much more snow before the rotation of the earth on it's axis makes it impossible. Hang tough."
