Options for Load Control

The Sunny Home Manager is offered by many manufacturers of heating systems, charging stations for electric cars and household appliances as an energy manager for use with PV systems. A prerequisite is that there is a compatible controlling interface between the devices and systems in the household via which the Sunny Home Manager can send its control commands.

In principle there are two types of control interfaces for this:

• SMA radio-controlled sockets

• Direct data connection

• Moxa for SG-ready heat pumps and power control functionality

SMA radio-controlled sockets

Switching three-phase loads using only one common actuator

Three-phase loads that are dependent on the simultaneous availability of all phases (e.g. three-phase motors), must not be controlled via three separate actuators (e.g. three radio-controlled sockets). In this case, you must use a single actuator with control of a three-phase contactor.

With this type of control, the devices can be started or stopped directly via connecting or interrupting the main power supply (e.g. a pond pump).

Alternatively, a relay or a three-phase contactor, which in turn can start a load, can also be controlled via the radio-controlled socket. This method can be used to switch on large loads (e.g. a large pump or a heater with three-phase power connection).

For example, the Modbus device Moxa E1214 offers the possibility to control a heat pump via the relay output R0 (terminal 9 and 10). These switching contacts then start the heat pump in a special operating mode in which surplus PV energy can be used to operate the heat pump.

Direct data connection

Some modern home appliances (see Technical Information "SMA SMART HOME - Compatibility list for the Sunny Home Manager 2.0" at www.SMA-Solar.com) have an Ethernet connection with which the data of the device can be called up via the local network. If there is an Internet connection via the network router, the manufacturers of household devices can use this data for maintenance purposes, for example. Visualization and control of the household devices via mobile devices (e.g. via app in the Smartphone) is also possible with this.

A further application of this direct data connection is the control of the device via the Sunny Home Manager in the energy management system. For this, a compatible data protocol must be implemented in the respective device via which information for energy management can be exchanged. Such data protocols are, for example, the EEBUS/SPINE Standard and the SMA proprietary SEMP protocol (information at www.sma.de/produkte/sma-developer.html).

The smart appliances send information on the load type, the planned energy requirement, and the preferred operating time period to the Sunny Home Manager. The Sunny Home Manager factors this information into its load control, and also taking the configured optimization targets in the context of load control into account, sends appropriate start and stop signals to the loads Home appliances with intelligent communication interface.