Since 31 March 2015 when the new battery and new solar panels were installed on my house we’ve been collecting data on the Tigo solar panels and Alpha Ess integrated battery and inverter systems.

The data is essential to reviewing the promises about the products’ performance and the best design to stay off grid.

Unfortunately, due to the Alpha Ess being brought to market before software had been fully tested, there are outages when no electricity was available to generate data.

Tigo DOES offer downloadable files, but in order to get hourly values, you have to download each day individually — that’s what makes Tigo time consuming. It’s not like the Efergy energy monitoring system, for example, where you can download hourly values for an entire month.  Although that system is used in the house it is showing values 50% less than the Alpha and appears to be unreliable. The tedious, time-consuming task of downloading each day’s data from the Alpha and Tigo sites had to be undertaken; urk!  My thanks to Marianna Verlage who endured this easily-fixed shortcoming.  The other energy use monitoring system in the house is provided by Wattwatchers but for some reason it or the site which provides access to it, Our Green Home, hasn’t been providing data; perhaps the outages have affected it or the system has not been properly re-installed by the solar and battery folk when those systems went in.  A work in progress here.

What the data tells me is I need another 2 kWh of available battery storage and another five more powerful solar panels with micro inverters to overcome shading and drops in panel power.  That will go in next week.

Winter gives least sunlight so the data for this season, such as it is, is invaluable.

I’m sharing the data we have collected here with you to help you go off the electricity grid.  There’ll be more data in the next few months.

Enjoy.

Michael