Day 9 of the Solar Install

Sarah and Pete arrived in the morning to finish up the WebBox install. Sarah's vege-oil truck was temporarly kaputt having broke-down on her way home last night, so they drove the company van in. The night before I was able to plug into the WebBox and access its http interface. When I configured it for DHCP and connected it to my home network, it was not accessible. Hmm.

After a little troubleshooting with Sarah and Pete, we figured out some of the wires in the RJ-45 receptacle were not seated/crimped correctly. An easy fix. Great! Now the WebBox is on the network, but it still needed to be connected to the inverter.

One more hole through the wall of the garage into the electrical gutter, tack up the cable, run it through, add the connectors, plug it in. Now it is all hooked up. Reset the Webox. This is it; will it work? We load the WebBox interface, YES it can see the inverter.

We went through the configuration, set everything up so it could send data to the SMA webserver, called SunnyPortal. However, we could not then logon to the SMA site. After trying a few more things, we called the SMA support number. They pointed us to a deeply buried page in the WebBox were we needed to "register". This was frustrating since there was another more prominent screen that asked if we wanted to use the SunnyPortal to which we answered Yes. It had no hint that other actions were needed. This process was not discussed in the install guide at all.

OK, so now we have registered and they will send us a SunnyPortal password within 24 hours. That finished Sarah and Pete's work for the day; they are off to another job in Aloha. Here is a picture of Sarah & Pete in front of the WebBox.

The SunnyPortal password arrived about an hour later and I setup the account. It is interresting, it has several reports and shows how many kilos of CO2 would have been produced if this power were generated from a brown source. Here is the link: http://tinyurl.com/2vxq37

Ironically, as soon as the monitoring starts, the sunny days here came to an end. Even on these rainy days a kilowatt or two of power is being generated. But if you consider power is only about a dime per kilowatt hour it is not too exciting. This summer will be much more interresting.

Next is the energy trust inspection.

Contrator Hours Today: 4
Total hours for the project: 70

Power Generated: 35 KWh