Show HN: My solar died for 6 months, so I built a watchdog | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My solar died for 6 months, so I built a watchdog

sunranker.com

15 pointsnorthify12 comments

Hi HN, Shawn here. My rooftop system lost about half a year of production and nobody told me. Not the installer, not the monitoring app, not the utility. I found out from an electric bill that made no sense, then spent weeks digging through the monitoring portal by hand.

SunRanker is what I wished existed that day. Connect a system once (Enphase OAuth, or a SolarEdge site ID plus API key) and it reads production daily, shows it in plain language, and emails you when something actually changes. Three alerts only. The connection broke, the monitoring went quiet, or output has been well below your own typical for days. Plus a short monthly review. No daily drip.

It's free, and my own system is on the homepage with its bad months showing. The gray months are my monitoring going quiet.

Would love feedback on the alert thresholds (drop detection is five days under half of a 28 day baseline) and which brand to support next. Tesla makes this hard for third parties.

Stack, for the curious. Laravel, Livewire, MySQL, and one scheduled job doing the nightly checks.

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> Not the installer, not the monitoring app, not the utility. I found out from an electric bill that made no sense, then spent weeks digging through the monitoring portal by hand.

It would help if you could clarify what your system does, exactly, that is better than the notifications and low production alerts in the 1st party apps

The Enphase app can send you texts, emails, and push alerts for low productions or different errors https://support.enphase.com/s/article/how-to-change-the-noti...

Clarifying what makes your app worth doing the auth or API key setup versus configuring the 1st party app property would make this easier to understand

> Solar breaks quietly. Panels don't make a sound when they stop earning.

Solar if anything is something that doesn't "silently break", you literally stop getting electricity. Everyone I know with solar has it front and center how much their batteries currently have charged, if the batteries are suddenly 0% and never increases, how wouldn't people notice?

This seems to be for something like you have a bunch of solar panels on a property/land where you don't visit at all, and you use it for solar panels and you only sell the electricity. But the website seems to be marketed towards individuals, not to companies.

Maybe I just misunderstand who this is for?

This is an Enphase system. They can be run grid tied without any batteries.

Some systems only report production once a month but don't need to work for the dwelling to have electricity from the grid.

I've never seen someone with only solar, basically everyone is still connected to the grid, so you don't stop getting electricity, you just start getting a bill.

If you look at your solar stats or battery stats every day, then yeah you'll notice sooner. But most people don't. Most of the apps for these things suck anyway.

I think this makes perfect sense for people with solar who aren't obsessed with it.

I just want to make some pretty lil lamp that glows green when solar + charging, orange when battery is discharging and slowly turns to red when it is near out of charge

Midnight Solar,the true OG in solar hardware and software has had remote monitoring for more than a decade, perhaps two, and even promote some outside apps for there hardware. And my baddy abused system has been working with essentialy zero down time for 15 years, and no faults or glitches, other than the above mentioned abuse ie:thats not a humm I have been hearing, it's sizzling, amazing what good hardware will survive!

This sort of stuff is why I just pay a utility to provide my electricity. I don't want to have to manage, monitor, or worry about what my solar panels are doing.

This captures one repeating idea I've had throughout my life. Where are the benefits of "specialisation" going?

Every corporation I'm employed at, now has me doing all the little jobs they used to employ someone specifically to do. Like book travel for instance. Now I need to be across so many different systems it's ridiculous.

Last time I needed a locksmith (broken lock) it was far cheaper (cost 30%) AND faster(!) to simply order the parts and figure out the jigsaw puzzle myself in an hour.

Most of the time I only have a qualified electrician do minor stuff around the house because legally I have to. For the harder things, I want the electrician though.

And now for some reason it is cheaper for every house hold(!) to become it's own electricity farm than for a society wide specialist organisation to do things at scale?

How are we failing so hard? Or is specialisation not really a good thing anymore?

It's very simple, the moment you add middle-man, the middle-man wants it due. And growing orgs often become less efficient.

And when you add having investors or worse, being publicly traded, it turns from service to profit extraction.

And they all need to pay tax too. By hiring electrician, you spend your money after tax to pay their tax, because apparently as society we decided company can put cost of existing into costs and deduct it from taxes, but a person can't.

> apparently as society we decided company can put cost of existing into costs and deduct it from taxes, but a person can't.

I agree with you that this an issue. Experience wise, I have seen a few people run "one person businesses" as highly paid contractors, which pays for their "company car" etc. But it seems to be walking the line and I wouldn't want to see how a tax audit plays out.

This looks nice, maybe make free more prominent on the site.

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