Solar monitoring: How it works

Solar Monitoring Explained

There are a lot of different inverter manufacturers out there, and they all provide–or the majority provide–some sort of solar monitoring.

Monitoring is the ability for you to see the performance of your system remotely. That’s either going to be on a website or on an app on your phone. Typically you’re going to be able to see the total production of the system, but there are micro inverters or DC optimizers that will allow you to see the individual performance of the modules.

Solar-Monitoring-Application-For-Mobile-Phone

It’s a great way to troubleshoot if there’s a problem with your system. We do have access to that, and we can help troubleshoot when problems come up. But you as the end user are really the one who is going to be using this monitoring system the majority of the time.

The big thing to remember is the utility does not use your monitoring system for any of their production or net metering numbers. They’re getting all of that from external meters on the outside of your home that they provide. Part of the reason is that those meters are revenue grade, so the data is a lot more accurate than the data that is showing up on your monitoring website.

The data from your inverter that gets sent out to the monitoring portal is subject to losses if there are problems with the internet. That’s pretty much the most common thing we see if there is any data loss which is why the utilities can’t rely on monitoring data for their production numbers.

Visit our service page if you need to submit a service request for your solar PV system.