[opentoideas]

thank you for that explanation and the hope of future improvements to an already excellent device.

 

i think i will stay as is for the moment as UK consumer units barely have room for the wiring never mind a pile of CT’s

 

once i resolve that issue and start monitoring all of the circuits i may move the 200A CT but for now i can live with it reporting as it does.

 

i suppose it would be nice to use the 2 200A CT that i have to measure the combined and the house demand separately ie . one on either side of where the solar connects but i dont believe the software logic would approve of this with both being on the same phase so for now my unconventional setup suits my needs better but at the loss of some functionality

[opentoideas]

thank you for the replies

I will have a check but am fairly certain on direction of the CT’s and switched off solar when configuring as directed however this step didn’t seem necessary at the time however I believe that the comment :

“Please make sure your 200A sensor is installed between your utility meter and the solar input to your system.”

may be the relevant one….. there are 2 ways to wire in solar here in the UK and the most common is to feed into a MCB in the consumer unit however the second way is to split the supply from the meter to the consumer unit and this is how mine is done.

the result of that is that my 200A CT measures “only” consumption and the solar generated is measures on a separate 50A CT  I did this as most measuring systems are not bi-directional so this gave more accurate readings and I was under the impression that this would be the same with the Vue?

 

if I move the 200A CT to before the solar then this will need to recognise that consumption readings can be positive and negative and that the load will always be a sum of measured – generated.  would this not introduce error unnecessarily?? as things stand I am measuring the true demand of the house load directly and the true generated solar

 

Eg. if house demand is 1KW and solar is generating 3.5KW with the current setup both are measured directly and accurately however if I move the 200A CT to where it is measuring the amalgamated house and solar then while the solar CT would still read the correct 3.5KW the 200A CT  would be reading 2.5KW and would need to recognise that this is flowing in reverse (exporting to grid) and also that this is not the true demand and calculate the difference to give the correct 1KW of household consumption……

before I move things around is this truly the best way to do this?

Although the instructions mention fitting the CT’s directionally I was under the impression that they are only able to “read” the magnitude not direction of a current and had assumed the request for directionality was possibly related to accuracy?

 

sorry to add complication and I hope you can help me understand as I deliberately avoided going down the route of having the solar wired to the consumer unit  so that I could keep the household demand separate as this was at the time a nightmare to monitor with systems using CT’s so I am hesitant to negate that advantage to measure what is a unused value and then rely on software to figure things out when I can directly measure the correct value for consumption.

 

if this messes up calculated totals I can live with that as I would rather the measured values accurately reflect usage rather than relying on them being calculated.

 

I hope that makes sense – thanks

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