Independent solar monitoring: What you need to know

Producing solar energy relies on having working, efficient equipment, and several factors can reduce your system's effectiveness. Shade, dirt, damaged wiring, and more can all cause your system to generate less electricity than it's capable of.

Independent monitoring companies are primarily data aggregation and management experts. They employ sophisticated software that ingests data from solar arrays and runs it through calculations to ensure the connected panels perform as expected. Monitoring services can be "hardware agnostic," meaning the software works with any panel or inverter.

A common misconception about independent monitoring services is that you can get their information from your solar system. This is only partially true; companies like Enphase and SolarEdge make inverters with built-in monitoring capabilities, but they don't necessarily provide the information you might need.

Monitoring your solar panel system through inverters does provide data on your system production, but it can't always diagnose a problem for you. Raw numbers may show decreased production from a specific panel. Unless you're an experienced solar technician, it will be difficult to understand what's physically wrong with that panel without outside assistance.

This is where independent monitoring comes in: a service takes the data your inverters collect from your panel setup and interprets it for you. This helps you understand when something is wrong, what is not working correctly, and what measures must be taken to have your system running properly.

Independent monitoring services have the unique benefit of actively monitoring your system, meaning monitoring companies will interface with an operations and maintenance company to help proactively address issues that their technology identifies. Knowing what your solar array is doing is only one step of the monitoring process. Through active monitoring plans, you can ensure that problems with your panels are recognized and diagnosed quickly and correctly to implement a plan of action to bring your equipment back up to speed.

Notably, an independent solar monitoring service does not necessarily involve a plan for physical repairs to your system if a problem is detected through data analytics. For repairs to your system, talk to your installer or consider a solar operations and maintenance plan.

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