For many customers, access to the data from their solar system is a revelation. It can be addictive, logging into an app or a dashboard to see the energy generation of your system.

Solar System Monitoring is relatively new, and systems installed ten years ago were not necessarily equipped to enable real time system monitoring.

So what does it do?

Your inverter will have a connection via wifi to a cloud based network run by the inverter manufacturer.

You’ll be able to log into a dashboard on your computer or to an app on your mobile device. From there your see live real-time data on your system.

· Live power output, with associated diagrams

· Historic generation, viewable by day, month and year.

· Warranty information

· Fault notification messages

Why is this useful?

For starters, it helps to know that your system is operating as it should. You cannot hear or see the solar panels operating, so it does help customers to know that they really are doing something!

If you use the monitoring apps for a while, your get to understand how your system operates. You’ll get to know that in sunny conditions, it will be generating a certain amount of power, and how that compares to intermittent cloud or rainy conditions.

As discussed elsewhere on this website, we are huge advocates of battery storage.

But in the absence of battery storage, you’ll need to be able to align your consumption to your generation. And the monitoring apps will help you to do this.

For instance – you’ll know its sunny, you’ll know how much is being generated, and that this is a great time to turn on the dishwasher.

Are some monitoring better than others?

Like anything, some apps perform better than others. However, we have found that all the manufacturers have put a lot of effort recently into improving their digital offering.

Hence, we believe that you’ll be satisfied with the performance of the monitoring provided by any of the major brands – and certainly the brands that are used by Brimstone Energy.

Generation meter

For regulatory reasons, all systems are still issued with a Solar Generation meter. With the introduction of smart meters and monitoring systems plus the removal of the FiT scheme, the generation meter has become largely redundant.

If you find any discrepancy between output stated by the generation meter compared to the inverter & the monitoring app, the generation meter will be the more accurate of the two.

Solis monitoring app

Here is an example screen shot from the Solis monitoring app.

Here you can see the type of data available.

It shows power generation over time, how much energy has been produced today, this month, and over the life of the inverter.