Merewether Weather, Merewether Tides and Solar Power Monitoring for Merewether, NSW, Australia - Newcastle Weather

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About This Site

This site is put together by Mangrove Mike (intrepid fisherman, wine lover, IT Geek, old-time punk, sensible dad, gadget lover).

I have Merewether Weather infomation here as well as power usage and power creation stats from my solar panels. There is also lots of interesting stuff (code, reviews, gadgets) that I have written and accumulated over the years and this site shares as much of it that is possible.

 

The Gear

The weather station I am using is the Davis Station Vantage Pro 2. I use the data logger connected via a USB/Serial bridge to a Mac Mini Server where I  use use WeatherCat (WeatherCat) to collect the data. I also send the data up to Weather Underground,PWS and CWOP.

I also have a Tempest Weather Station set up which is a great solution for a minimal weather station. The weather details (and links to details about it) are at https://tempestwx.com/station/48231/ 

Tides are generated by Xtide a great program that I have used for a few years. Love it!

The power monitoring is done with the Current Cost meters and the PowerWall API.  I now use a combination of perl scripts, Raspberry Pis and the superb node-red to get and shape up the data.

Inspired by Andy Stanford-Clark (http://stanford-clark.com), Dale Lane (http://dalelane.co.uk/blog) and Andy Piper (http://andypiper.co.uk) all data is published via MQTT which centralise the code and devices into a publish and subscribe model.

All of the code and systems I use to collect and publish this information is on my Mac Mini Server - which has recently been upgraded to a M1 and is brilliant.

Solar System/s

Solar 2018

We have two solar systems installed. The first a 3kW system installed in 2010 and the second a 5.02kW system installed in November, 2018.

Original System - 3kW

The original panels are the back row. They are ECOKES 170Wp Mono Cystalline Panels. The inverter is a Schneider Conext RL 3000E (which replace a dead Oelmaier ) and the 3KW system was installed by Eco-Kinetics .This document has more details - Solar System Specs .

New System - 5kW

The new system uses much smarter tech and was installed by HCB Solar (https://hcb-solar.com.au) . The panels are 15 x NEW LG ELECTRONIC NeON2 335W Solar Panels,  Inverter - 1 x SolarEdge 5kW Inverter, DC Optimisers - 15 x 370W Optimiser.  Both systems feed into a Tesla Powerwall 2.

 

External Feeds

CWOP - http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/wxpage.cgi?call=DW6277

Weather Underground  - https://www.wunderground.com/dashboard/pws/INSWMERE2

PWS Weather - http://www.pwsweather.com/obs/MEREWETHER.html

PVOutout - https://pvoutput.org/intraday.jsp?id=72310&sid=64193 and https://pvoutput.org/intraday.jsp?id=72310&sid=64192