Monitoring Your Solar Installation
How can I monitor my solar panels?
Monitoring your Solar Installation – In order to monitor and check the status of your solar panel system, solar inverter manufacturers offer a free to download and use, monitoring platform. On installation our solar experts will connect the system to the app for you, leaving you with an understanding of how it works. That is available to users via an online platform – mobile app or both. Each brand of inverter offers a slight variation of a monitoring platform, the basic features of solar panel monitoring include:
- Real-time power generation.
- Historical Generation and Performance Data.
- Details of your solar panel system.
What are the benefits of using solar panel monitoring?
Monitoring your Solar Installation – Having access to your solar monitoring comes with several benefits including:
- Remote access to real-time data, including your generation, usage and exported energy.
- Being able to set your batteries to force charge from off-peak tariffs.
- Being able to review and compare past performance data, and generate reports.
- And able to detect faults and issues through sudden drops in performance.
- Helps homeowners to optimise their energy usage.
- Email alerts for quick notifications regarding updates and potential system faults.
How does solar monitoring work?
Monitoring your Solar Installation – As the inverter is the brains of your solar PV system, it should be no surprise that the data comes directly from your system’s inverter.
This is because both your solar panels and battery storage are wired directly to your inverter. In order to provide this data to the user,
an internet connection is required, along with a dongle connected directly into your system’s inverter.
A wi-fi dongle will act as a modem to provide your solar inverter with internet access or enhance the existing connection.
Many manufacturers also offer access to your system’s data via an API, which may be useful if you want to custom-code displays or integrate solar with a smart home.
Where do you get the apps?
There are many options – Here are two we use regularly:
