Having just had our Sungrid PV solar panels installed by Solar Advanced Systems we were keen to be able to monitor the production of electricity by the PV panels without needing to visit the Sunny Boy inverter each time to view the display.
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| 14 Solar panel array - Sungrid PV installation with Sunny Boy 3000HF inverter |
SMA Sunny Boy 3000HF (as well as the 2500HF and 4000HF) inverters have the capability to display data using Bluetooth. SMA Sunny Boy supply a device called the Sunny Beam that will show the production from your solar panel system. However this costs around £175 in the UK and there are much cheaper alternatives to the Sunny Beam to show this data on your PC or laptop.
Step 1)
Firstly you need a laptop or PC that has Bluetooth capability. If your PC doesn't have this built in then you can buy an external USB Bluetooth dongle for approx £10. This is one such device from Ebuyer A class 1 Bluetooth adapter would probably be a better bet than a Class 2 adapter as it will give a much longer range than class 2. The difference between a Bluetooth class 1 range of 100m and class 2 range of 10m is very significant and would mean the difference between being to view the data from any room in your house to only being able to view from the room next to the inverter.
Step 2)
Once the Bluetooth dongle is installed you need to download the free Sunny Explorer software. This is available as a free download from the SMA website.
http://www.sma.de/en/products/software/sunny-explorer.html
Step 3)
Install the Sunny Explorer software, let it detect your system. You will need to enter its password which is set as default to 0000.
Step 4)
View your data and download the log files to your PC. By default these are stored in a folder called SMA under the My Documents folder.
Step 5)
Additional tools are also available to analyse and store the data from the SMA Sunny Boy 3000HF./2500HF/4000HF inverter range and I will cover those in another blog post.
just had 3000hf installed with 14x 250 panels????? but didnt enable the blue tooth...ahhhh,,
ReplyDeleteIt might be worth checking with a different device to see if Bluetooth is setup. On iPhone it doesn't detect the Bluetooth signal but once I bought a Bluetooth USB dongle for the laptop it could see it ok. It is very distance dependent as well so you need to be quite close.
ReplyDeleteyeah... just down loaded software onto laptop...works brill... but the blue light not on the inverter..hope this inverter is big enough for my 14x250 panels
ReplyDeletedownloaded sofware onto laptop windows 7 works great ..so easy..no light on inverter to show bluetooth on... hope sunnyboy 3000hf big enough to handle 14 x 250 panels..i believe the max is 3620????
ReplyDelete3000HF sounds a little low for panels generating 3620 but I know someone else with a 3000 who has 3300kWp panels. You might miss some of the peaks but it also means on days like we've had this month that you'll get better efficiency
ReplyDeletethe max the panels produce is 3500+5%
ReplyDeletesunnyboy max is3620 so heres hoping/..i dont suppose the weather we get will max the inverter often..north wales is not known for a lot of clear sunny days..
This unit was recommend by the supplier using some program. Northwales not known for ultra fine days. The max sunnyboy does is 3620 so hopefully it will cope
ReplyDeletehey. the blog is just awesome to read about. its really interesting and informative. do keep up adding more posts.
ReplyDeleteSMA Inverters