I am going to be working with a group of high school students this summer who have very limited prior solar experience. We will be installing a small off grid PV system (1.9kW) and small wind turbine generator (400W to 1kW). I plan on using three Morningstar Trimetric controllers, one to control charge of the PV array to the battery bank, a second as a load control relay, and a third as a dump control. I can connect all the Morningstar controllers together on an RS485 bus and connect to the solar charge controller via an Ethernet link to the local area network. The Morningstar controllers will be monitored via a classroom computer, and they will be able to give me Ahrs in from the solar array, Ahrs to the load, Ahrs to the dump load, but not the Ahrs in from the wind turbine generator. My question is, how can I add monitoring of the wind turbine Ahrs that goes to the battery? I will need something that can get to the local area network. Wifi or direct broadcast may be difficult because I have to go through the electronics cabinet and two brick walls.
The only thing I can think of is to add a Tri or Penta Metric from Bogart Engineering, which would duplicate the info the Morningstar controllers would give me, but could add the Wind Turbine Generator as well, but perhaps there is a better way. Thanks for your thoughts. Mike Kocsmiersky Spirit Solar 413 734-1456 (cell)
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