While the Enphase Enlighten monitoring site is pretty swanky, it’s slow to load and extremely flash-heavy. It has the advantage of being able to do per-panel monitoring, event log monitoring, etc, but I was hoping for something a little more lightweight. Enter pachube.com. Let’s build out the internet of things….
The Envoy system monitor for the Enphase inverters has very basic output monitoring abilities; it shows you current power, and daily, weekly, and lifetime energy production. So, we can screen-scrape this and upload it to pachube, then do what we like with the data.
I have this script on a 5-minute* 10-minute cron job to get the data. The Envoy doesn’t seem to update faster than 5 minutes, and it’s such a gutless wonder, doing it any more often than that brings it to its knees, and it stops updating the main site! If you have problems, you may want to reduce the updates to 15m or more.
To use the script, first get a Pachube API key, and set up a new Pachube feed. Add 4 datastreams, for instantaneous power, daily production, weekly production, and lifetime production, in that order. Edit the script to add your envoy hostname/IP, your API key, and your feed ID. Then put the script on a 5-minute cron job. You’ll start seeing the data on a Pachube feed page like this. Then you can use some of the apps highlighted on apps.pachube.com to create widgets as in the image above, as seen on this page. You can even get an iPhone app to monitor the data, or create an OSX dashboard widget from the HTML objects!
*Edit: Don’t set the cron job to be more frequent than 10 minutes. I’ve had trouble with the Enovy unit bogging down and not reporting to Enlighten if you hit it more than every 10 minutes (!)