(And in other news, I hit 5MWh of lifetime solar production today, woo!)

pvoutput.org is a free service run by a mystery man down under, which can accept solar generation as well as household consumption data, and slice, dice, and graph it just about any way you would like.

It’s really quite amazing, he has set up a site which, IMHO, puts some of the big solar vendors’ monitoring sites to shame.  It’s a little tough to navigate to everything you can do, but you can:

• Compare output between 2 days
• Compare output to pvwatts production estimates
• Compare production by season or by weather
• Join teams of people with like minds or similar equipment
• See consumption percentage by hour
• And it goes on and on…

But most impressive is that this isn’t tied to any particular data source – First of all, the site has a bidirectional API so you can send data from/to just about anything.  For non-hackers, he has something called the “pvoutput integration service” which is a java framework which can talk to many different types of devices, and there are contributed scripts as well.

He’s also recently added support to automatically pull in data from other sources, from the Enphase API, to pachube.com‘s internet of things, to the TED 5000 energy monitoring device (which is sometimes cheaper on Amazon, btw).

If you’ve got solar, you really should be sending your data to pvoutput.org.  It’s hands down one of the most impressive energy-monitoring related sites on the web.

The only downside is that since the code that runs the site is, as far as I know, not published under any open source license, it makes the whole enterprise a little bus-sensitive.