WVC700 – I don’t like Cloud Intelligence

Recently I moved over to a WVC700Life Grid tie inverter as I’d discovered my solar panels output voltage s was about 2v to low for its input voltage so I wasn’t getting the best from them. The WVC has a higher input value but buy putting my panels in parallel meant I was well in this range and not over as i would be on the SG600. The WVC does have a little app but it lacks the statistical data I was getting from the NETLM software and after a while just stopped working properly

For this reason I decided to write my own.

My Software

The software is available on GITHUB and i’m actively making updates at the moment so it is a work in progress but version 1 has been released and made public.

The software is specifically for the LIFE version of this inverter which seems to work slightly differently to the other WVC versions.(Please see the README file for details) It is currently being tested on a WVC700 R3 (LIFE Edition) with 2x 230 CraigSolar panels in parallel, but I would love to hear from anyone that could try it on other versions or give me feed back for improvements and additions.

The software uses a PiZero (£15) to upload the data to a free ThingSpeak account. You can see my public channel here. You can track current live data as well as historical data over time and the graphs are adjustable to suit your data, and ThingSpeak enables data export as CSV, XML or JSON files.

Currently I’m uploading data every 30 seconds (this is adjustable in the code) which is generating about 1200 upload messages per day, this will increase as the days get longer but is well with the 8192 limit set by Thingspeak for the free account.