question

Hi @ejrossouw,

Thanks for the feedback, the VRM team is in full swing to further improve the platform. I recently got to sit down for a full day round table meeting with the developers to address issues like this.

I agree that this can be confusing, the same issue arises when a generator is used to charge batteries.

This is not such an easy problem to solve in a way that is visually intuitive, keeping things simple to understand while showing the energy flow.

Adding an additional two colours (Grid to battery, and generator to battery) would make that current consumption graph a lot more confusing.

"System consumption" should reflect the FULL SYSTEM picture meaning "grid to bat" and "grid to consumers" combined.

The problem with this suggestion is that batteries do not really 'consume' energy, merely store it for later consumption by the loads, which is also counted.

If grid to bat was just added to grid to consumers, and bat to consumers, you would see double the actual kWh's that were consumed by the real loads, as consumed by the site. Once into the battery, and again coming out. I don't think that is what most people would expect either.

As you have seen, for now the information is available either in the kWh export file, and in the advanced tab for those that need the additional complexity/detail.

In the future, there are improvements on the way to VRM to help with ESS, and other specific systems that will provide more specific insight into what is going on, while hopefully also making things even more intuitive.