Not all people are familiar with this fact, but there are solar monitoring systems that can be quite helpful in the matter of providing insight on how your solar system is performing.
Thanks to it, you can get information on your system’s energy generation and consumption, you can find out if there’s any damage to your system, and if it needs to be better optimized. Solar panel monitoring is extremely important because, without it, you won’t be able to know if your solar installation is productive and effective enough.
How Solar Monitoring Works?
Solar inverters are crucial for solar PV monitoring, given that the whole process goes through them. You probably know that you can purchase a solar inverter that has adequate solar monitoring software.
Now, when your inverter transforms DC current into AC power you can use for your home appliances, all information about your system’s production and power levels is being gathered and sent right to the monitoring system if you have one.
Every homeowner can access this data in several ways, but one of the most popular is via a smartphone app or other smart home devices. In most cases, you won’t even have to have a WiFi connection. There’s an on-site monitoring option as well since you can set it all up to receive monitoring information on a monitoring device that’s located at your property.
When it comes to the Internet connection, you should know that microinverter monitoring systems rely on a WiFi connection and that they won’t be able to gather information on each individual solar panel in real-time without it. But monitoring systems with power optimizers will transmit data even when the WiFi connection is down.
Besides the fact solar monitors will provide you with information on systems performance and consumption, a monitoring system can offer you several tools that will help you better understand your whole solar setup of yours.
This way, you will be informed when there’s some sort of a problem detected or a panel defect you need to take care of. Sometimes, these monitoring systems will allow you to get a history of data.
That can be quite valuable because you will be able to predict the output of your solar system based on information about how it was impacted by the weather in the past.
Most Popular Monitoring Systems
Enphase and SolarEdge are the two most popular solar inverter providers. In most cases, homeowners are looking for their products because they can come with a solar monitoring system that’s very reliable and high-quality design. Now, they do offer two very different types of solar monitoring, and you need to figure out first which one you need.
SolarEdge has a power optimizer that needs to be tied up to a central inverter, and you can use a wireless connection to send the data to your mobile application. On the other hand, Enphase offers a system of microinverters that are attached to every individual solar panel.
They are designed to communicate with the main device using WiFi, which will then provide you with monitoring information on your app.
These two systems are the most wanted at this very moment, but of course, there are many other companies that are selling solar monitoring systems.
They can be quite different regarding their type and the way they work, which is why you should consult with an expert before you decide which monitoring system to invest in.