I’ve been tracking my usage and comparing that with the estimates for my solar power system. I wrote about the database design and tracking the usage and some of the estimates.
In this post, I want to look at the reporting in Power BI. Here is my refreshed comparison report as of Jul 31.
I have 3 sections here. At the bottom right is a table with a range setting that shows raw data. I need to write about the import process for this data, but that’s for another day.
At the top, I have the running total of production (light blue) and estimated production (dark blue). The first month or so we were close to the estimate, but we started to outperform the estimate regularly, which is good news. The Tesla wasn’t in the model or estimate, and it uses some power, so it’s good the system is ahead.
The bottom left is the month by month comparison, which you can see is a fairly steady overproduction each month.
The configuration is fairly simple for this report. For the line chart, I’ve set the x-axis as the date. My Y-Axis has the sum of both of the raw production numbers. This gives me a running total across time.
The lower left month by month bar chart is similar, but I’ve added the month, which separate this into buckets. This lets me see if a particular month’s comparison is hidden in the line chart by the long term running total.
I can’t change much, but this does help me to look for anomalies and possible production issues. Perhaps a panel isn’t performing or there is another issue. By glancing at this every few days, I can decide if I need to look at more detail on the system.
Hopefully the company doing monitoring would detect issues, but this is a good double check for me and it also gives me long term data backup in case they have issues.