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

https://sunranker.com
11•northify•3d ago
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.

Comments

embedding-shape•42m ago
> 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?

danpalmer•34m ago
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.

conorcleary•30m ago
Some systems only report production once a month but don't need to work for the dwelling to have electricity from the grid.
kevin_thibedeau•19m ago
This is an Enphase system. They can be run grid tied without any batteries.
SoftTalker•25m ago
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.
fh67•23m ago
This looks nice, maybe make free more prominent on the site.
Aurornis•16m ago
> 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

metalman•2m ago
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!

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

https://sunranker.com
11•northify•3d ago•8 comments

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