Energy Production & Consumption chart

What this widget is for

The Energy Production & Consumption chart answers questions like "how much did the solar produce yesterday?", "how much did we import from the grid last month?", or "what did the battery cycle through across the year?". It shows energy totals — how much was produced, used, imported, exported, or moved through the battery over each hour, day, or month — as a row of bars you can compare at a glance.

It is the right widget for energy questions (how much, over a period). For power questions (what is happening right now, in watts) use the live-status icons or a power chart instead.

Companion guides

• Dashboard overview — how to add, move, resize, and remove widgets, and how to save layouts as different Views.
• Device Historical Analytics chart — the per-device deep dive when you want to plot individual battery / inverter readings instead of plant-wide totals.

Where to find it

Open the Dashboard, click the pencil icon to enter edit mode, then click Add New Widget. In the picker, search for Energy Production and click Add Widget. The chart drops onto your dashboard with the default header Daily: Interval Energy — you can rename it from the gear-icon settings.

The chart at a glance

A newly added chart shows:

• The title at the top, prefixed with the active period — Daily: …, Monthly: …, or Yearly: ….
• Period buttons to switch between Daily, Monthly, and Yearly. The active period is highlighted.
• A date picker (top-right) to pick which day, month, or year to plot, with a small download button inside the calendar.
• A bar / line toggle in the chart toolbox so you can flip the same numbers between a bar chart and a line chart.
• The legend along the top, listing each series with its total energy for the chosen period next to the name — e.g. PV: 12.4 kWh. Click a legend entry to hide or show that series.
• The bars themselves, one per hour (Daily), per day (Monthly), or per month (Yearly).

Choosing a period — Daily, Monthly, Yearly

The three period buttons control both what the date picker offers and how the bars are grouped:

• Daily — pick a date. The chart draws one bar per hour from 00:00 to 23:00. Use this to see "what happened during today" or to compare hour-by-hour on a past day.
• Monthly — pick a month. The chart draws one bar per day for that month. Use this for "which days produced the most" or "when did we import the most from the grid".
• Yearly — pick a year. The chart draws one bar per month for that year. Use this for seasonal trends ("summer vs winter") or annual totals.

When you switch periods the chart clears and re-fetches the data automatically. The chart title's prefix changes to match (Daily / Monthly / Yearly).

Choosing what to plot

Open the gear icon to choose:

• Chart Title — the name shown in the header.
• Energy unit — one of Wh, VAh, VArh (see the next section).
• Which series to show — nine toggles, one per data stream:
  • PV — solar production.
  • PV Prediction — forecast solar production for today (appears only in Daily on today's date).
  • Load — total site consumption.
  • Load Prediction — forecast load for today (also Daily + today only).
  • Grid Import — energy drawn from the utility grid.
  • Grid Export — energy sent back to the grid.
  • Generator — energy produced by a generator.
  • Storage Charge — energy going into the battery.
  • Storage Discharge — energy coming out of the battery.

Tick the streams you want; the chart redraws as soon as you change a switch. The legend along the top shows only the series you've enabled, each with its total for the chosen period.

Understanding the energy unit

Energy comes in three flavours depending on what you measure:

• Wh — real (active) energy. What you actually pay for and what your loads consume. This is what most users want, and it is the default.
• VAh — apparent energy. Real energy plus the "reactive" energy needed by motors, transformers, and other inductive equipment. Larger than Wh whenever the load isn't purely resistive.
• VArh — reactive energy. Only the reactive part. Mostly useful when investigating power-factor issues or commercial tariffs that bill reactive consumption separately.

Stick with Wh unless you have a specific reason to look at the other two. The y-axis automatically scales: small totals show in Wh / VAh / VArh, larger totals in kWh / kVAh / kVArh, and very large totals in MWh / MVAh / MVArh.

Reading the chart

• Bar heights are energy deltas. Each bar is the change in the energy counter over its interval. A tall bar = a lot of energy moved; a short bar = a little; a missing bar = no data for that interval.
• Hover any bar to see a tooltip with the series name and the bar's exact value with units.
• The legend doubles as a series toggle. Click a name to hide that series and uncluttering the chart; click again to bring it back.
• The legend doubles as a totals readout. The number next to each series name is the total for the whole chosen period, not the value of one bar. So in Daily view, the legend tells you the total for that day; in Monthly view, the total for that month; in Yearly view, the total for that year.

Switching between bar and line view

The chart toolbox (top of the chart) has a small bar / line icon. Click it to toggle the same data between a bar chart and a line chart. Bars are easier to read for clear hour-by-hour or day-by-day totals; lines can be easier for spotting overall shapes and trends across long periods.

Predictions (PV and Load)

Two of the toggles — PV Prediction and Load Prediction — show forecasts rather than measured energy:

• They appear only when the period is Daily and the selected date is today. On any other day, or in Monthly / Yearly view, prediction series are ignored even if their toggles are on.
• When they do appear, they extend the x-axis to cover the full 24 hours of today (00:00 to 23:00), so you can see how the rest of the day is expected to go alongside the hours already measured.

Use predictions to spot, for instance, whether expected solar will cover the rest of today's anticipated load, or to plan exports / charging.

Downloading the data

Inside the date picker calendar there's a small download button. Click it to download an Excel file with one row per interval per series, with start value, end value, and the total (end − start) in all three units (Wh, VAh, VArh) regardless of which unit the chart is showing.

The file is named for the active period and chart title, e.g. Daily: Interval Energy.xlsx.

Who can do what

• Any signed-in user can add the chart, switch periods, change dates, choose units, toggle series, switch between bar and line views, and download the data. The chart is read-only — it never sends a command back to a device.

Common issues

• "No Data For Selected Date" — the chart is showing this when there are no readings for the chosen day, month, or year. Common causes: a date before the site started reporting, a meter that was offline that period, or no series enabled in settings.
• Predictions are toggled on but not appearing. Predictions only show in Daily view on today's date. Switch the period to Daily and pick today.
• Bars look much smaller than expected. Check the energy unit in settings — switching from Wh to VAh or VArh gives bigger numbers because they include reactive components. Also check the y-axis scale label (Wh vs kWh vs MWh).
• One series's bar is missing for an interval but neighbours have data. Either the underlying counter didn't move (genuine zero energy for that interval) or readings for that exact interval are missing. The widget plots null rather than zero in that case so you can tell "no data" apart from "true zero" — a missing bar means we don't know, a flat-on-axis bar means we know it was zero.

Tips and gotchas

• Pick a unit and stick to it across charts. If you have several energy charts on a dashboard, set them all to the same unit so totals are comparable at a glance.
• Hide what you're not comparing. Energy totals lose meaning when too many series compete for the eye. For a clean "production vs consumption" view, turn on PV and Load and switch the others off.
• Storage Charge minus Storage Discharge is round-trip loss. Over a day, the difference between energy stored and energy released back is the battery's losses for that day — useful for spotting degradation if the gap grows over time.
• The chart refreshes with the dashboard. When Auto Update is on in your View Settings, the chart re-fetches its data on every refresh, so a chart left open on today's view keeps catching up as the day progresses.