My installation was completed about 2 weeks ago which consists of 19 SunPower E20-327-D-AC panels and a NeoVolta NV14 battery. NeoVolta were the ones that setup the Solarman app on my iPhone to monitor the system and I have been using it daily.
Opportunities for improvement:
-The app looks like it was designed for the Chinese market which is fine but the English language translation has typos. Some of the alerts still seem to be in Mandarin (when picking more than 2 metrics to view in the area chart shows an alert in Mandarin for example).
-I could not get the WiFi dongle/adapter to connect to my NetGear Orbi RBR50 mesh Wifi. I actually had the NeoVolta guy come out to my house and we ended up having to plug in my old Apple time capsule 3rd generation router (802.11 N) to get it to connect. So it seems like either the hardware or this app has issues with mesh WiFi
-On the “Summary” tab, there are the 5 icons - solar panel, inverter, grid, house and battery. The solar panel icon always reads zero because it only detects DC solar panels (per the NeoVolta guy) and my panels are AC (they have micro inverters) so you have to look at the inverter icon in the middle to gauge panel production. This is fine except that in the app is refers to a “power” measurement, which appears to be the solar panel production but it is always zero. Because of this, the “current generation power” info box below the energy flow diagram says zero and when picking “day” on the area chart, the “power” measurement is always zero. The app should be updated so the “power” measurement can work for either DC or AC panels (or be a summation of both).
-On the area chart, when picking “day”, it seems like the “discharge power” and “charge power” labels are backwards. “discharge power” is showing the charging of the battery whereas “charge power” is showing the discharge. Similarly the “on-grid power” (power sent to grid) and “purchase power” (power bought from grid) are backwards.
-Not truly real time. My definition of real time is a matter of seconds and at most 1-2 minutes. I dug thru the settings and mine is configured with “logging frequency” set to 60 seconds and “upload frequency” set to 5 minutes. I cannot change these but I believe its taking 5 measurements (snapshots) and uploading them every 5 minutes. This is more like batching data in windows than real time telemetry streaming (i.e. using a technology like Kafka, Azure Event Hub, AWS Kinesis etc).
Other feature ideas:
-Provide access to the raw telemetry data, either via an API or via flat file/CSV files would be useful for personal analysis.
-Push notifications would be great. For example, when my battery is charged to 100% from the solar, I’d like to turn on various devices (for example my EV charger).
-Similar to above but support for IFTTT
Thanks and keep up the work 😀
4.0
