Although there are now well over 1 million households in Australia with solar PV systems, only around 1% of them have any sort of performance monitoring equipment in place. This leaves the vast majority of system owners in the dark as to what to do if they think that their system is underperforming. To fill this apparent gap in the market, Suntech R&D Australia has come together in a partnership with Australian solar technology company Envais Solar to develop a cost-effective, intelligent solar monitoring product that will tell solar system owners and operators how well their system is performing compared to how well it could be working.
The product, called Solar Analytics, makes use of sophisticated algorithms to determine what the optimal yield of a system could be given its parameters–array capacity, orientation, etc–and local weather conditions. This allows a level of insight into a system’s performance not possible with most monitoring platforms, which monitor only output throughout the day. Having the ability to understand in detail the what factors are influencing a system’s performance (and when) allows installers to swiftly identify and easily troubleshoot when issues arise. This means less system downtime in the event of a problem, as well as greater yields over the lifetime of the system.
The main features of Solar Analytics are:
–A web portal for observing live system output, accessible to both system owner, installer and other relevant parties. The web portal also allows those who have access live energy use at the home in question–how much solar power is being consumed vs exported, as well as how much power is being purchased from the grid.
-A ‘Solar Health Check‘ function that will let you know how your system is performing compared to how it should be performing in the current weather.
–Alerts sent directly to the system owner so that they know what’s happening with their system when problems do arise.
–Intelligent fault detection & diagnosis: Solar Analytics can determine when a drop in output is due to a system problem or due to the weather, so when the system’s output is low on a sunny day, you’ll hear about it.
–Delivery of regular, scheduled performance reports give peace of mind and further shore up the system owner’s awareness of what’s happening with their system.
–Quick installation. Available in a manual version that requires no hardware, or an Automatic version with hardware that installs in less than 30 minutes.
© 2014 Solar Choice Pty Ltd
I have read with alarm that only 1% of solar systems have an internet connection to monitor the system. From personal experience it is absolutely essential all solar systems have a monitoring facility. I have had 4 major outages in 3.5 years and have lost about $1500 in energy supply in that time and that is with on-line monitoring! Without on-line monitoring I dread to think what the figure would be. You simply cannot “set and forget” your system as they are prone to serious faults either with the panels themselves or the inverter.