Andrew Bare
Head of R&D

Rex Kehoe

Rex Kehoe
Director of Installers

SunPower Monitoring System

June 21, 2019

In this week’s live stream, Andrew and Rex talk about the importance of having a monitoring system with the solar panels. They exclusively cover the highlights of the SunPower Residential Monitoring Systems.

A solar panel system is a huge investment on your property so it is obvious you would want to know if it is working right as you are spending a lot of money on this asset. This is why a Solar Monitoring System is mandatory. It helps you keep watch on how your solar system is performing. You can see the current kilowatt-hour production, savings, and the amount of carbon dioxide that you’re not omitting into the environment.

What is a Solar Monitoring System?

A solar monitoring system is a specialized software that provides real-time and historical information about your solar production. It helps you keep track and manage energy generation and usage, billing, carbon offsets, and more; can be accessed via a mobile device, home computer or a remote operations center.

A sound monitoring system just records what your system is actually producing. But, the best solar monitoring system displays how much energy your system should be producing. It is important to have a monitoring system that matches production information against simulated values. This helps you see where your system is exceeding, meeting or missing the ideal production forecasts.

You can get a monitoring dashboard with any solar installation. In this live stream, we’ll be diving into the SunPower Monitoring System.

SunPower Monitoring System for Your Home –  How it Works

SunPower Monitoring System (SMS) is an optional add-on service with your solar panel system. It combines big data and analytics to give you the most accurate information about your system. Like mentioned before, it tells you how much your system should be producing but not just what it is producing or has produced.

It consists of on-site equipment along with software housed on a monitoring server. Your monitoring equipment must be plugged into a wall outlet and connected to a high-speed internet connection in order to display data. By simply logging into your account, you can easily access the information on your system’s energy production and environmental savings online. Or just download the app to monitor your kWh activity, including the ups and downs of your energy usage during the day, your electricity bill savings and how much CO2 you’re avoiding.

Image: SunPower

With the SunPower Monitoring System, you can – 

  1. See Energy Information – Comprehensive visibility into your system’s production per day, month, or year can help you to optimize your solar investment.
  2. Estimate Bill Savings – Based on energy production and energy usage, the system calculates your savings.
  3. See Environmental Savings – View an estimate of reduced emissions achieved by your solar system.
  4. Conveniently Monitor Your Energy Production – Download the free app to your mobile devices to keep track of your production anytime, anywhere.

SunPower Monitoring System Dashboard

In order to view the system dashboard, you need to register your SunPower Monitoring System and sign into your account. The dashboard will give the details of the current power produced by the system, today’s energy, and lifetime environmental savings.

Current Power:
The top left corner on the dashboard would give you the current power generated by your system during the last five seconds.

Today’s Energy:
You can see how much energy your system is producing for every hour of the day. As shown in the image above, this system is producing around 2.6 kWh of energy at 11:00 AM.

Lifetime Environmental Savings:
You can see the energy produced by the system and the equivalent of the emissions prevented by generating renewable energy with your system. As shown in the image above, this homeowner has avoided 13.7 tons of CO2 emissions. On the other side, the homeowner could have prevented 13.7 tons of CO2 emissions by planting 207 trees and not driving 30,351 miles.

SunPower Monitoring System Graphs

The monitoring system provides graphs for better insights into the system’s production and performance. You can look at the energy produced on each day, week, month, year and a lifetime of the system.

When looking at the yearly production of your system, you may notice that production would be more in summer than in winter months. Your solar panel system has to be designed in such a way that the overall production, throughout the year, has to be equaled out to give you the maximum savings. Get in touch with our solar experts for a perfectly customized design for your needs.

One interesting fact about SunPower Monitoring systems is they provide a Consumption Monitoring Kit that allows you to monitor your home energy usage and provides additional monitoring features. But, you might have to pay a little extra for this feature.

The main drawback of the SunPower Monitoring System is that it doesn’t have panel level monitoring which is available on other monitoring systems. As a homeowner, you can see the overall production of your system but cannot see the individual panel’s performance. But your installer can have access to panel level monitoring and can provide technical assistance when they notice a panel underperforming compared to the remaining panels.

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