This could maybe even go in the “Significant energy changes” section. Even on the darkest, rainiest day, my system has never produced 0 kWh. If I go a full 24 hour period without producing any solar, I want to be notified immediately. It could mean my inverter has gone out. It could just mean that a neighborhood kid decided to pull the shutoff lever on the meter. Regardless, I want to be notified that something is wrong with my solar system.
Great idea! I’d like to see this too.
Thanks for suggesting this, it does seem like a fundamental alert that is fundamentally missing!
I’ve brought it up before … and for potentially more urgent reasons I think it’s a crucial alert:
The alert equation is actually quite interesting. In the absolute sense, near 0 watts, it’s trivial (during known-daylight hours) but you can imagine anomalies like huge dark clouds being something that could initiate an alert: “Your dryer load is delayed due to weather”.
I’d like this as well. One reason we recently added
Sense Monitor and Sense Solar was due to outages. In the 5 years we’ve been on a grid tied system we’ve had 2 outages. Both were grid caused spikes that knocked out a fuse in our utility disconnect. We missed days of grid power input. An alert would be appreciated…
That’s why I’d prefer it to be an alert if you produced 0 energy for the whole day and not a more instantaneous type alert, thought that would be helpful too it’s trickier to implement because of scenarios like what you describe.
+1 - I just had my solar inverter die; and didn’t notice for 3 days. I only did notice because I happened to be checking the Sense app during the day for other reasons, and noticed that the solar “bubble” wasn’t present as it should have been.
I immediately looked at trying to setup an alert if I generate 0 kwh during any 24 hour period (which otherwise ~never happens, even in overcast winter days), and was surprised to find that there’s no current way to setup this alert.
+1 I wonder how much solar production is lost because people don’t notice their system isn’t working. It’s astonishing that the invertor monitoring doesn’t alert anybody (hello Solar Edge - is it you or your installers that don’t do this?). And then it takes installers too long to fix the problem. This seems like low hanging fruit in terms of benefits to customers and reducing GHG emissions.
Has anything ever happened with this? I have a fuse that blows periodically shutting down the solar array and getting a notification that the system is below a certain number would be great. I could even live with notifications every time it goes above/below a value. Please add this capability. Thanks.
I know this isn’t a solution for the masses and I can’t speak for future development. But for anyone who is running Home Assistant this could easily be done using automations.
Good suggesting, It should be a toggle that I can enable or disable in the Sense app. I live in a snow belt area and when my panels are covered with 2 feet of snow they produce 0 kwh. I don’t need to be reminded that my solar array is not producing for that reason.
I just came here to see if there was a way to get notifications for solar production disruption, after I found out that my solar had somehow turned off 10 days ago and I had noticed it. I searched all over Sense to set up a notification and couldn’t find it.
I agree, this is a huge omission. There has to be a way to get an alert when no production has occurred for more than 24 hours. Yes, there are cases (like snow cover) that could lead to some false reports, but it would be (a) easy to disable in the winter; (b) easy to ignore. Personally I would be glad to see from the notifications when the snow cover melts, one reminder a day would not bother me.
