Downloading data from an Aurora PVI 3.6 invertor

Liquid101

I've recently purchased a house which has a PV system.

I'm desperate to get my hands on some data to monitor performance rather than just taking readings off the little screen. It does a have a USB port, but from what I can find this is for linking inverters together rather than downloading information.

Does any body have this model of inverter?

SteveCritten

Without checking at home I think its the same model as mine and I couldn't find anything to do what you are asking except a generic one to fit inline.

Gerbil

Only just seen this thread but did you get it working? I have the Aurora 3.0 inverter and you can definitely extract the outputs from it. I can dig out the details if you're still stuck.

Liquid101

No, I've been just making a record of the units produced from the meter. Is there a better way?

Gerbil

You can download the Aurora manual and their communicator software from the Power-One web site here.
It's a while since I collected data that way, but from memory the USB port works perfectly and failing that you can buy a cheap RS485 (industrial serial) to USB convertor on eBay. The advantage of the RS-485 interface being that you can run the signal over CAT-5 cable quite a distance so if your PC is nowhere near your invertor and you don't want to keep connecting a laptop to the invertor you could run a cable direct to your PC. The Aurora Communicator software will allow you to pull down the daily outputs for the past year and export to CSV etc for upload to PVOutput etc.

if you want something a bit fancier, there's a wealth of data on monitoring Aurora invertors on the Whirlpool Greentech forum here. It looks like someone has documented using a Raspberry Pi to download the Aurora data since I last visited the Whirlpool forums. I had mine connected to a Linksys NSLU2 for a while with the network connection of the Linksys plugged into a homeplug adapter so I could read the invertor outputs remotely.