Power Flow widget

What this widget is for

The Power Flow widget is the dashboard's animated map of how energy is moving through your site right now. PV, battery, grid, generator, and load each appear as an illustration; lines connect them, and small dots travel along those lines in the direction energy is flowing. Live numbers next to each component tell you how much.

Use it when you want to see the system at a glance — whether the battery is charging or discharging, whether the grid is helping or being exported to, whether the generator is pulling its weight. It's the natural centrepiece of a "what's happening now?" dashboard.

For totals over a period of time, use the Energy Production & Consumption chart instead. For deep dive into one specific device, use the Device Historical Analytics chart.

Companion guides

• Dashboard overview — how to add, move, resize, and remove widgets.
• Live status icons — a row of compact single-value tiles. The Power Flow widget shows them all together with the connections animated; icons show one value each, larger and simpler.
• Energy Production & Consumption chart — the totals-over-time companion.

Where to find it

Open the Dashboard, click the pencil icon to enter edit mode, then click Add New Widget. Search the picker for Power Flow and click Add Widget. The widget drops onto your dashboard at 4 × 4 — bigger than a status icon, so the picture has room to breathe.

The widget at a glance

You'll see up to five components, with lines drawn between them:

• PV (top — solar panels)
• Grid (left — utility connection)
• Battery (with a state-of-charge percentage)
• Generator (right — only when enabled and reporting)
• Load (the building or site)

Each component has a power label next to it showing the current value, and a rated-power bar that wraps around the icon to show how close that component is to its capacity. Between them, flowing dots travel along the connecting lines.

Reading the flow

• Dots travelling toward the load mean that component is supplying the site.
• Dots travelling away from the load (into a component) mean energy is going into that component:
  • PV always flows out of PV when producing.
  • Grid dots travel into the load when importing (positive grid power) and out when exporting (negative grid power).
  • Battery dots travel into the battery when charging and out when discharging.
  • Generator dots travel into the load when the generator is running; the line stays still when it isn't.
• Numbers are absolute magnitudes. The label doesn't include a + / − sign — direction is conveyed by the dot animation instead.
• All numbers use the same unit across the widget. If one stream is in MW, the others are too, even if they'd normally be shown in kW — this makes the components directly comparable. The unit is chosen automatically to fit the largest value in view.

Configuring the widget

Open the gear icon. The settings dialog has two parts:

Which components to show

• PV, Grid, Battery, Generator — switches that show or hide each component. By default PV, Grid, and Battery are on and Generator is off (most sites don't have one).
• The Load is always shown — it's the destination every flow points to.

A component is also hidden automatically when the data stream has nothing to report for it. For example, on a site with no battery, the battery group won't appear even with its switch on.

Rated power, per component

Each component has a Rated Power (kW) field:

• Load Rated Power
• PV Rated Power
• Grid Rated Power
• Battery Rated Power
• Generator Rated Power

The widget uses these to draw the percentage bar around each component — the bar fills proportionally to current value ÷ rated power. Setting accurate rated values turns the bars into a "headroom" gauge: full bar = at capacity, half bar = at half capacity.

Reading the battery SoC

The battery icon shows the state of charge as a percentage next to the icon. It's the same SoC value the Battery Power status icon shows, drawn here in context with the flow direction. When the SoC arc on the battery itself is filling, the battery is charging — the dots on the line confirm it.

Who can do what

• Any signed-in user can add the widget, switch components on / off, set rated-power values, and read the flow. The widget is read-only — it never sends a command back to a device.

Common issues

• Everything fades to 30 % opacity and shows "--". The data stream stopped delivering. The Auto Update option in your View Settings controls a periodic background refresh — leave it on so the widget reconnects when the stream resumes.
• A component is enabled in settings but doesn't appear. No data for that component is in the stream. Examples: a site with no generator hides the generator group automatically even with the switch on; a battery that hasn't reported state of charge yet won't fill in the SoC label.
• The rated-power bar is empty even though the component is producing. Rated Power is still set to 0 in the settings. Open the gear, enter the device's real rating in kW, and save.
• Dots animate the "wrong" way around a component. The animation follows the sign convention: positive grid = import, positive battery = charging. If the wiring or sensor polarity is reversed, the dots animate opposite to expectation. Raise it with support so the polarity can be corrected at the source — the widget faithfully draws what the data says.

Tips and gotchas

• Pair the widget with a row of icons. Power Flow shows the relationships; a strip of Live status icons above it makes the individual numbers larger and easier to read at a glance. The two complement each other.
• Resize for board screens. The 4 × 4 default reads well on a desktop browser. Bump it to 5 × 5 or 6 × 6 (the maximum) on a wall-mounted dashboard so the dot animation is visible from across the room.
• Hide what you don't have. A widget showing four components when the site has only two looks busy. Switch off the components that aren't there so the visualisation reflects the site honestly.
• Set generator rated power even if rarely used. When the generator does fire up, the bar tells you whether it's idling or being worked hard — useful for fuel-burn estimates.