Once you have your solar photovoltaic panels in place on your rooftop, how do you know how well they are performing? Maybe you're lucky and you have net metering where you are, so you can sort of guess at it because your electrical bills are lower than they were. But it would be useful if you could get more information so you knew how much you were producing and how much you were using.
Fat Spaniel is an amusingly named company (with an overweight corporate mascot) which offers monitoring services for building power systems, particularly PV. They "provide hosted data monitoring, management and control services that OEMs, installers, and distributed utilities can use to optimize performance and ensure investment returns for all types of renewable energy systems." And, as a third party, they can help verify system performance to an owner, rather than relying on the manufacturer's claims about what the system will do.
Fat Spaniel monitoring shows both immediate and historical data from a power system. Owners, users, and the merely curious can see how much power a building is using, and how much of that is coming from a renewable system. The monitoring system shows both building demand as well as energy output by the generating system.
Power monitoring and display information can be beneficial in green building where it can help gain an additional point toward LEED certification. And state grants to encourage the installation of renewable power systems also sometimes require a monitoring and display component as a precondition for awarding the grant.
link: Fat Spaniel Technologies
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written by Joe M., July 01, 2007
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written by Joe M., July 01, 2007
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JUN 30
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