Home screen percentages are wrong when solar is generating

[OneMan]

I installed a Gen 2 Vue two weeks back on my home with solar.  There is no problem with the sensors or their orientation or the data I’m getting, just that the percentages on the Main and Solar lines of the Home screen are incorrect.

I saw a post here in the community where a user who also had solar was confused by the numbers.  His or her numbers all added up but now that I have one, I can see the difficulty, especially since the percentages for Main and the solar channels are just flat wrong when the solar is generating, backfeeding the grid or all being consumed in the house.

Here’s what the Vue app currently shows:  (I’m using the kW values from the post I mentioned.)

Mains          14.0 100%
Load 1         2.0    4%
Load 2         1.0    2%
Solar L1  -16.0    0%
Solar L2  -16.0    0%
Balance    43.0   94%

You’ll notice that the solar lines are 0% which is not accurate.  They should be negative just like the kW is negative!  -35% is the correct figure for each solar line, negative 70% total.

Notice that Main is 100% yet not all the energy is coming from the grid.  It should be a smaller number, 30% in fact.

I wondered what would be another, hopefully more lucid, way to show the lines and the arithmetic (simple addition) and to get the percentages correct.  Here’s my suggestion: (please excuse that the columns don’t line up well as I can’t pick a monospaced font in this editor and I’m not going to take the time to see if I can do this in HTML!  😉  So here goes!

Load 1                   2.0    4%
Load 2                   1.0    2%
Balance              43.0  94%
Usage (Main)   46.0 100%

And if the Vue has been configured as having generation/solar, the final line would be slightly modified (removing Main because it will be moved to the very last “Net” line) and then the solar negatives lines to get to the net usage as detected by the Main sensors.

Usage      46.0 100%
Solar A -16.0 -35%
Solar B -16.0 -35%
Net (Main) 14.0 30%

This approach can easily show the 70% contribution of the solar and that only 30% came from the utility.  The current way can’t do this at all; it gives the inaccurate and misleading percentage figures for Main and for the solar lines.

In the case that the net usage was negative, the last line would look like this:
Net (Main)      -10.0 -22%

Whether Emporia should choose to change the order of the lines in the Home screen or not, the code that calculates the percentages needs to be fixed to look like these correct percentages:

Mains          14.0  30%
Load 1         2.0    4%
Load 2         1.0    2%
Solar L1  -16.0  -35%
Solar L2  -16.0 -35%
Balance    43.0   94%

But as you can see, maintaining the same presentation and simply fixing the wrong percentages does not have the new line I propose for gross usage, so it is not possible to show the percentages adding up to 100%.

What does Support and Dev think about this?

[Author]

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