• About Us
    • — About Digitized House
    • — Advertise
    • — Editorial Guidelines
  • Policies
    • — Ad Policy
    • — Privacy Policy
    • — Cookie Policy (US)
Digitized House | Guide to the Connected Home
  • Home
  • Connect Your Home
    • Deals
    • News
    • Reviews
    • Security Cameras
    • Security Systems
    • Smart Displays
    • Smart Door Locks
    • Smart Lighting
    • Smart Plugs
    • Smart Product Round-ups
    • Smart Speakers
    • Smart Thermostats
    • Smart Water
    • Smoke + CO Detectors
    • Solar Photovoltaics
    • Window Coverings
  • Ecosystems
    • Amazon Alexa
    • Apple HomeKit
    • Google Assistant
    • SmartThings
    • Open Systems
  • Design Your Home
    • Architecture
    • Healthy Home
    • Home Design
    • How-To
    • Green Building
    • Real Estate
    • Sustainable Home
No Result
View All Result
Digitized House | Guide to the Connected Home
  • Home
  • Connect Your Home
    • Deals
    • News
    • Reviews
    • Security Cameras
    • Security Systems
    • Smart Displays
    • Smart Door Locks
    • Smart Lighting
    • Smart Plugs
    • Smart Product Round-ups
    • Smart Speakers
    • Smart Thermostats
    • Smart Water
    • Smoke + CO Detectors
    • Solar Photovoltaics
    • Window Coverings
  • Ecosystems
    • Amazon Alexa
    • Apple HomeKit
    • Google Assistant
    • SmartThings
    • Open Systems
  • Design Your Home
    • Architecture
    • Healthy Home
    • Home Design
    • How-To
    • Green Building
    • Real Estate
    • Sustainable Home
No Result
View All Result
Digitized House | Guide to the Connected Home
No Result
View All Result
Home Connected Home

Gauging the Health of Your Solar Panel Installation

Tom Kolnowski by Tom Kolnowski
16 November 2015
in Connected Home, Green Building, Review, Solar Photovoltaics, Sustainable Home
Reading Time: 6min read
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

Part 2 in our series on managing and monitoring energy production and consumption in your home, apartment, or flat. 

David Allen, the noted author and personal productivity guru, once wrote: “Your ability to generate power is directly proportional to your ability to relax.” Now, I am an Allen fan and enjoyed reading his 2001 book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, but was he foretelling a kicked-back lifestyle for today’s zero net energy homeowners, their rooftops resplendent in rows of azure-hued solar panels?

Probably not, given the singular focus of Allen’s lifehacker book on reorganizing the myriad tasks in our personal and professional lives into manageable, stress-free workflows. What is decidedly true, however, is that a rooftop solar panel installation is probably one of the lowest-maintenance components of today’s high-performance homes. That is not to say you should install them and forget them, however. They should be appropriately managed and monitored to ensure they continue performing the power-production jobs you hired them for.

More Original Content FromDigitized House

CES 2021 Connected Home Highlights from the All-Digital Event

Wasserstein 3-in-1 Floodlight with Ring Charger Review

Recycling Outdated Consumer Electronics: A Comprehensive Guide

Our Holiday 2020 Gift Guide: Top Buys, Sure Bets

Infographic: Best Ways to Secure Your Holiday Tech

D7K_1800_featured
How healthy is your rooftop-mounted solar panel installation? A new horizon of sophisticated management and monitoring tools may hold the answer.

Largely attributable to sophisticated software embedded in many solar installations and anytime access through mobile apps, you may never need to ascend a ladder to monitor the health of your photovoltaic panels. That is certainly the case in our lab home, where we deployed a grid-tied, 7.75 kW system that was fully enabled for remote management and monitoring. The rooftop installation consisted of 33 Trina Solar photovoltaic panels—secured to our standing-seam Galvalume metal roof via an aluminum racking system—and connected with microinverters from Enphase Energy. To enable remote management and monitoring of the system, we installed the Enphase Envoy, a networked gateway that enables real-time communication with the Enphase Enlighten suite of software and apps.

D7K_1347_featured
On our standing-seam metal roof, the microinverter boxes await installation of their respective solar photovoltaic panels.

In such a microinverter-based system, each solar panel is paired with a dedicated microinverter box that is typically installed directly beneath the panel. The microinverter’s primary job is local conversion of the direct current (DC) produced by the panel to home-compatible alternating current (AC). In our case, we used the Enphase M215 microinverters, devices ready to communicate with the Enphase Envoy gateway straight out of their boxes.

As Enphase has evolved their solar system installer-oriented Enlighten Manager and the more homeowner-centric MyEnlighten monitoring software over time, it has become increasingly powerful and sophisticated. While we have not had an opportunity to test-drive similar software from other manufacturers, we can testify that the Enphase mobile apps for iOS and Android are exceedingly user-friendly and designed from the ground up for mobile, touch-screen usage, but they can work equally well in a traditional browser.

To tap into the most comprehensive set of data around your arrays, the Enlighten Manger would be the tool of choice. In fact, in all likelihood, your Enphase system installer used a more advanced version of this tool during the installation and configuration of your arrays, and installers can also use the same software to remotely troubleshoot issues that may arise at your site.

While the software can provide real-time snapshots on the performance of the entire system, the capability to drill down into the individual microinverters—and by association the current and historical data originating from its paired solar panel—can be quite valuable. Need to understand how a single solar panel performed for a specific date or date range since it was installed? Enlighten Manager can replay the power production metric (in watts) through a minute-by-minute animation, or read out total energy production (in kilowatt hours).

5DM35412-Edit_skew_0212_featured
The Enphase Enlighten Manager can deliver holistic, system-level performance metrics as well as drill-down data related to performance over time for an individual solar panel.

Another aspect of Enlighten Manager we appreciated is the ability to graphically depict power or energy production for a given date range, either across the entire system or for a given solar panel. Clicking on any area in the chart reveals a pop-up with the metric for that point in time.

By contrast, the MyEnlighten app is designed to provide energy production information on the system as a whole, and most homeowners may find this is the only app they need in order to keep tabs on the health of their installation. The Overview tab can display production metrics for any given day since the system was installed, and includes a numerical view of the day’s production, a graphical representation of the arrays, and a bar chart with energy production depicted in 15-minute increments throughout the day.

5DM35412-Edit_skew_0209_featured_crop
Grading on the proverbial bell curve: Nearly-perfect sunny days can produce a smoothly-plotted view of energy production data through the MyEnlighten app.

Through the Production tab, the particularly-powerful matrix view can be accessed by selecting among the Months, Days, or Hours sub-tabs. Each cell in the matrix is shaded in gradations of blue, ranging from dark blue (for the lowest energy production levels) to light blue (for the highest energy production levels). Touching or clicking any cell reveals the total production in kilowatt hours for that time period, plus a corresponding bar chart at the bottom. For example, using the Days tab in the iOS app on an iPad, it is possible to display energy production for 11 months, with each cell in the matrix representing a single day. And on the smartphone version, we were able to display 24 months of daily data, again with each day’s cell clickable to glean energy production data.

Alternatively, you can use the graph view in MyEnlighten to instead display a bar graph, again by selecting among the Months, Days, or Hours sub-tabs. As you would expect, this generates a primary bar chart, and a secondary matrix view appears at the bottom for easily navigating between the respective months, days, or hours.

5DM35412-Edit_skew_0201-Edit_featured_crop
The matrix view in the MyEnlighten app is particularly powerful, capable of delivering at-a-glance energy production for the system by virtue of its blue-shaded, clickable cells. Integration with Weather Underground enables integration of historical weather data for a nearby station.

MyEnlighten can also be configured to associate your solar installation with a specific weather station from the extensive Weather Underground network, and then that weather station’s temperature readings and weather conditions are integrated into the MyEnlighten interface. Once that association is made, it is possible to view real-time weather conditions on the Overview tab as well as the historical high and low temperatures from any date or time selected in MyEnlighten. Hyperlinks enable clicking straight into the respective weather station’s dedicated page on the Weather Underground Web site.

5DM35000_screen_6682-2_featured
Power in your pocket: Using the smartphone version of MyEnlighten, 24 months of daily energy production data is readily available at your fingertips.

Tools such as Enlighten Manager and MyEnlighten are excellent additions to your home-front management tool kit and quite highly evolved, enabling at-a-glance system health, access to drill-down performance data, and much more. One downside, however, is that this class of tools can only provide insights on your rooftop energy production—they have no visibility into your home’s energy consumption metrics. In a later installment of this ongoing series, we will delve into whole-house energy monitors, hard-wired tools that can measure and track both local energy production and consumption.

More About This Topic:

  • More from Digitized House | Guide to the Connected Home
  • Sign Up to Get Weekly Digitized House Updates
Tags: non-affiliatesolar energysolar photovoltaicsZero Energy Living Lab Home
Previous Post

Latest News: Digitized House on Apple News

Next Post

Three shades of the Nest Learning Thermostat

Tom Kolnowski

Tom Kolnowski

Tom Kolnowski is the Chief Content Officer & Founder of Digitized House Media, LLC, the publisher of Digitized House | Guide to the Connected Home. When he isn’t writing about smart home technology, sustainability, and high-performance architecture, you’ll find him exploring faraway destinations with his family.

Related Posts

From CES 2021, the Fledging Hubble for iPad integrated USB-C hub and case. Image: Fledging.
Connected Home

CES 2021 Connected Home Highlights from the All-Digital Event

15 January 2021

So long, Las Vegas! For 2021, the mammoth CES event normally held in convention halls all across Las Vegas moved...

The Wasserstein Floodlight with Charger and the Ring Stick Up Cam Battery during testing. Image: Digitized House.
Review

Wasserstein 3-in-1 Floodlight with Ring Charger Review

11 January 2021

Offering 2000 lumens of floodlight safety and continuous charging for a Ring Stick Up Cam Battery or Spotlight Cam Battery,...

Loading iPhones into the Daisy recycling robot at Apple. Image: Apple.
Sustainable Home

Recycling Outdated Consumer Electronics: A Comprehensive Guide

26 December 2020

Almost everyone in the world uses consumer electronics devices in one form or another. We live, work, communicate, or get...

Next Post

Three shades of the Nest Learning Thermostat

sustainable contemporary door

Pairing contemporary door design with sustainability

Day 1: Green from the Ground Up

12 Days of Sustainable Reads: Day 1

As an Amazon Associate, Digitized House may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links, ads, or buttons on this page. See our full Affiliate Link, Sponsorship, and Ad Policy.

More from Digitized House

CES 2021 Connected Home Highlights from the All-Digital Event

Wasserstein 3-in-1 Floodlight with Ring Charger Review

Digital Cul-de-Sac: IBSx Show Village Homes Go Virtual

Recycling Outdated Consumer Electronics: A Comprehensive Guide

Our Holiday 2020 Gift Guide: Top Buys, Sure Bets

Infographic: Best Ways to Secure Your Holiday Tech

Infographic: What Amenities Do Homeowners Value the Most?

Best Holiday 2020 Smart Door Lock Deals

Best Black Friday Smart Audio Tech Deals

Should You Buy a Smart Home or Upgrade the Home You’re In?

About Us

Digitized House is the Guide to the Connected Home.

We help global consumers make their 
Connected Homes smarter, healthier, safer, and 
more sustainable through streams of original content. You can see our story here.

Like what you see on this website? You can also read us on our Apple News App Channel.

More Info

  • About Us
    • — About Digitized House
    • — Advertise
    • — Editorial Guidelines
  • Policies
    • — Ad Policy
    • — Privacy Policy
    • — Cookie Policy (US)

Affiliate Disclosure

As an Amazon Associate, Digitized House may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links, ads, or buttons on this page. See our full Affiliate Link, Sponsorship, and Ad Policy.

Recent Content

From CES 2021, the Fledging Hubble for iPad integrated USB-C hub and case. Image: Fledging.

CES 2021 Connected Home Highlights from the All-Digital Event

15 January 2021
The Wasserstein Floodlight with Charger and the Ring Stick Up Cam Battery during testing. Image: Digitized House.

Wasserstein 3-in-1 Floodlight with Ring Charger Review

11 January 2021
Image: Woodley Architectural Group and Professional Builder.

Digital Cul-de-Sac: IBSx Show Village Homes Go Virtual

31 December 2020

© 2015-2020 Digitized House Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Connect Your Home
    • Deals
    • News
    • Reviews
    • Security Cameras
    • Security Systems
    • Smart Displays
    • Smart Door Locks
    • Smart Lighting
    • Smart Plugs
    • Smart Product Round-ups
    • Smart Speakers
    • Smart Thermostats
    • Smart Water
    • Smoke + CO Detectors
    • Solar Photovoltaics
    • Window Coverings
  • Ecosystems
    • Amazon Alexa
    • Apple HomeKit
    • Google Assistant
    • SmartThings
    • Open Systems
  • Design Your Home
    • Architecture
    • Healthy Home
    • Home Design
    • How-To
    • Green Building
    • Real Estate
    • Sustainable Home
  • About Us + Policies
    • About Us
    • Advertise
    • Editorial Guidelines
    • Ad Policy
    • Privacy Policy
    • Cookie Policy (US)

© 2015-2020 Digitized House Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved.