Energy Monitoring - Measuring and Understanding Energy Flows
The household makes use of electrical energy in different ways. To enable effective energy management, therefore, it is necessary to understand in detail the energy flows in the household.
In an SMA Smart Home, energy consumption can be measured at various points:
The integrated measuring device of the Sunny Home Manager or the SMA Energy Meter at the point of interconnection provides the electrical measured values for PV generation, for grid feed-in, and for grid-supplied power as a cumulative value across the line conductors for the entire household.
Using the available radio-controlled sockets, the Sunny Home Manager can individually measure and monitor the energy consumption of specific loads. The more loads that are monitored in this way, the more complete is the energy consumption data basis of the household.
The Sunny Home Manager collects all the information on the energy flows and makes it available for evaluation via Sunny Portal in various diagram displays.
The information can be used to answer the following questions, for example:
What is the energy consumption of the household?
How much energy is supplied by the PV system?
How much energy is required by selected loads?
How often and for how long are these loads in operation?
Answering these questions will enable you to analyze and understand the energy flows in the household, e.g.:
Which loads require the most energy?
Which loads possibly require too much energy and should be replaced by more energy-efficient models?
Which usage habits for loads should possibly be changed in order to use PV energy more effectively?
What effect would switching to a different electricity tariff have on the energy costs?
Using this knowledge, energy management measures can be defined. These measures can lead to savings in energy costs and also help to protect the environment. For automatic load control, these findings provide guidelines on when it is most efficient to switch on certain loads.