One great advantage of residential solar energy is the literal absence of any moving parts.
Since the only things that move are electricity-generating subatomic particles stimulated by sunlight, you avoid all the wear and tear and potential for malfunction that inevitably arises when dealing with any kind of mechanical system.
The upshot is that your solar system ought to function problem-free for at least 25 years, at which point the materials composing the panels may start to degrade enough to require replacement.
Still, “Man makes plans, God laughs,” as the saying goes. And, as slight as the chances are, it’s still possible for a problem to arise before your panels reach their 25–30-year lifespan. Suppose it does. Or, for whatever reason, suppose you simply start to suspect that your solar system isn’t working right.
It’s natural to think you’d be looking at an expensive house call in order to ease your troubled mind. But that’s another advantage of solar energy. Or at least it is when you choose ReNu, at any rate.
All of our solar installations include access to software that gives you the power to monitor system performance and diagnose any problems in real-time from your cell phone.
In fact, at ReNu, we make sure that you’ll be able to monitor not just the system as a whole, but each individual solar panel as well. That means that, in the unlikely event something does go wrong, you’ll be able to precisely locate where the problem is.
Inverters
Solar panels generate direct current (DC) electricity. Since your household runs on alternating current (AC) however, your system has to have some way of converting DC to AC.
This is done by devices known as inverters. But, besides their main job of converting DC to AC, inverters also contain all the sensors for the software that monitors your overall system performance.
Some solar installers use a single inverter for the whole system. That means that all of the DC electricity generated by the panels gets converted to AC power at the same time. One disadvantage is that, even if they do provide monitoring software, the sensors in the inverter will only have access to the system as a whole and, hence, won’t provide any information on any panels individually.
The upshot is that, with a single-inverter system, if one panel starts to malfunction, even if you do have monitoring software, there’s no way of knowing which one it is.
(If the system has too many panels for a single inverter, the installer may group them into two or more “strings,” with one inverter for each. Meaning you still won’t be able to get performance data on each individual panel but only on each string of panels as a whole.)
At ReNu, however, we always use a special kind of inverter called a microinverter. Just as the name suggests, a microinverter is a compact inverter that gets attached to a single panel. So instead of having all your solar power converted to AC in one fell swoop, the electricity from each panel is converted before it enters the system.
As you may have guessed, one advantage of using microinverters is that, instead of merely monitoring your system as a whole, you get individual sensors that feed information from each panel to the monitoring software.
So, if something does go wrong with one of your panels, you’ll be able to not only instantly diagnose the malfunction, but also determine exactly which panel is the culprit.
Solar Monitoring Software
The microinverters we use at ReNu allow for a wealth of information about your system performance visualized in easy-to-understand formats. You’ll get:
Full visibility of your system's technical and financial performance, including interactive charts and site layout.
Visualization of solar panel production as well as household energy consumption.
Performance data for each individual panel, for each “string” of panels, and for the system as a whole.
Comprehensive reporting and analysis tools, including the ability to schedule automatic reports and export reports
Moreover, since the monitoring software is all web-based, you don’t need to download anything and can access your system performance data from your smartphone anywhere in the world.
And the information is visualized in an easy-to-follow way. So, regardless of how tech-savvy you may be, you’ll have the peace of mind that comes with being able to instantly make sure your solar system is working like it should.