The aim of Solar Predictor is to display irradiance data (essentially energy derived from the sun) as half hourly bar charts so that users can make an informed guess as to how much energy has been/will be provided during the day. This, in turn, can assist in determining how much any solar batteries may need charging during cheap rate tariff periods.
The data is provided by Solcast who offer limited (but still very useful) half hourly readings, free to home owners with PV systems. In order to avail themselves of this free data, users must set up a My Home PV system account with Solcast. Once this has been completed the user's Resource ID and API key must to be entered into the appropriate fields on the Solar Predictor screen in order to retrieve readings. The Resource ID and API key only need to be entered once as they are then stored on your local computer. Although that information is passed on to a background process that process does not store the information in any way.
A condition of the free accounts is that users may only make a maximum of 10 calls to the Solcast API per day. Each time the Solar Predictor background process runs it makes 2 calls to the Solcast API, effectively limiting the total number of calls to 5 per day. For this reason, each time the process is run to obtain the latest readings, these readings are stored in Local Storage with the option to save the data as a raw file. It should be noted that there is a finite delay between requesting data from Solcast and that data being displayed whereas data from Local Storage is displayed immediate;y.
To use
Solar Predictor:-
- Ensure that your Resource ID and API key are displayed in the Solcast section
- Select Solcast if you want the latest data or LocalStorage for the most recently stored data
- Select which day's readings you wsh to see
- Click on the Display Readings button
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