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Finn’s a big fan of advanced solar power system monitoring, particularly the Australian-developed Solar Analytics solution. Here’s why.

Finn: For “Ask Finn” this month, I’m going to answer a question that I get asked all the time.

“I’m buying a solar system. I’m getting consumption monitoring anyway -should I go the extra mile and get a premium Solar Analytics package?”

.. which is software made in Australia in Redfern, Sydney by the company Solar Analytics.

Now, if you want to add Solar Analytics to your system, it’s quite a big ask at the moment because it’s up to 600 bucks added to the cost of the solar system. And if you’ve already got good monitoring, why would you want Solar Analytics on top? I’ll give you two good reasons.

Number one, Solar Analytics have spent years perfecting the algorithms that tell you if your solar system is running properly. They’ll give you a percentage figure and it will spot stuff that’s going wrong with your system before almost anyone else knows about it.

I’ll give you an example. I’ve got a friend, they had a Fronius system on their roof. They had Solar Analytics, and Solar Analytics started pinging them. It said there’s a problem with the system; it’s running at about 85% and it seems to be getting worse. We called up the installer. The installer was a good guy who was referred through SolarQuotes. He came straight round. He had a look – one of the MC4 connectors1 had a problem with it – and it was melting.

So, that could have been quite nasty if it hadn’t been picked up on. So, Solar Analytics can spot issues early.

The other thing that’s just come out I’ve been asking them to do for ages. They’ve got a thing called Plan Optimiser. Now, this is getting more and more important as electricity tariffs become more complicated. We’re getting demand tariffs2. We’re getting time-of-use tariffs3. We’re getting solar sponge tariffs4.

What Solar Analytics can do now is it can look at your actual energy data and it can compare that with all the electricity plans in Australia – and can say, “Hey, this is absolutely the cheapest plan for you, based on the actual amount of electricity you import and export”.

And they did a survey of a bunch of customers, and the average person was saving 400 bucks a year5.

And there’s another thing about Solar Analytics that’s making it even more compelling. Depending on what inverter you’ve got, you don’t even have to buy the expensive Solar Analytics hardware anymore. You can actually just buy the software, which is a lot cheaper.

And they’re slowly integrating with all the big inverter manufacturers. They’ve already got there with Sungrow. They’ve got that with Fronius. And it’s confidential, but I’m pretty confident there’s other big inverter manufacturers that are going to be getting on board soon.

So should you buy Solar Analytics if you’ve already got monitoring?

I reckon yes. Many installers disagree with me, but I’ve got it on two of my systems and it’s been invaluable. I love it. You don’t look at it every day. In fact, you don’t look at it at all after a while, but that’s not why you buy it. You buy it because it sends you an email saying, “Hey, there’s a problem with your system” or “Hey, you could be on a cheaper electricity plan”.

This segment is from SolarQuotes TV Episode 11: The Australian-Made Solar Edition – it’s all about clever PV-related tech developed here in Australia such as Solar Analytics.

Related: Learn more about the benefits of advanced solar monitoring.

Michael caught the solar power bug after purchasing components to cobble together a small off-grid PV system in 2008. He's been reporting on Australian and international solar energy news ever since.

An interesting concept, but I do wonder how their predicative algorithms will perform outside the capital cities where BoM data and predictions are more crystal ball and generalised than concrete and specific.

It’s also not quite clear that SA will offer value for money, at least with the short term plans.

Nor is it clear what fault tolerance they provide. In my case for instance, every time I have a power cut I get data corruption – 3 faults this month alone means I’m showing MWh and\or negative values for those days, which flows on to the monthly, yearly, and total data. Such corruption renders what should be useful and interesting data (and is when it works) into frustrating garbage. It has been suggested I may be able to solve data corruption due to power cuts by adding a wifi repeater or some other gadget to collect the inverter signal and speed it to the primary router but it’s not clear why this should work. Oh well, at least it’s something to try. Who knows, maybe it will actually work. And if not, at least I can clearly state that wasn’t the problem.

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