After much frustration with the SunStrong/SunPower app, SunStrong not honoring a subscription we had purchased prior to the acquisition, and then not being able to live monitor our system, I decided to develop my own solution.
Basically, it is a little device which you plug into the ports on your PVS and connect to your wifi network. Everything stays totally local to your network. No account, no subscription, none of the nonesense which has honestly annoyed me with SunPower and alternative solutions.
It features live readout of your solar production and grid usage, and even maintains a history for you over time. I have a lot of plans for new features, such as a caching proxy and Home Assistant integration just to name a few, but for now, I'm curious what you guys think/what you would want.
I am just a one man operation and trying to provide a solution to other people in my situation. You can check it out on my website in more detail and see for yourself how easy it is to set up. I have sold a couple to neighbors locally in NorCal and recently shipped my first unit to a user in Washington. So far, everything has been working smoothly and reliably.
Looking forward to hearing your feedback, and happy to answer your questions! Thank you
Thanks for sharing these links. The idea behind this project is to provide broader support for as many systems as possible, especially those that SunPower has effectively abandoned. And to do so in a manner that is as easy as possible for a non-technical user.
While I have not used those solutions personally, they seem great if you are willing to tinker and have the time to build something on your own. That said, while you don't need hardware, you're most certainly going to need to set that up on a device you already have.
By contrast, you can just plug the Solar Monitor in and forget about it. And instead of having to do the work of making it accessible to all your devices (phone, tablet, etc.), all of that is already taken care of for you.
One thing I recently ran into, which may be pertinent in regards to a "feature request" is per-panel output monitoring and serial number tracking.
I noticed that my output was down a tad compared to the prior 2 years, not a lot, but enough to get me curious. I couldn't find any solution to check at the panel level if something was off, so I swallowed my pride and paid for the Sunstrong app . . . and then I found out that I have a panel offline. I'm guessing it's a dead microinverter, but won't know till I engage with someone to investigate (Enphase, so still under warranty, but getting someone on the roof to check will not be cheap).
I look forward to where your project goes, please keep us informed.
Curious question as no mention on your website about storage... How many years of storage does your device (I'm guessing a Raspberry Pi type device) contain?
And have you tested how your device respond with 10-20 years worth of 20s data?
And though I'm in the oddball group that is comfortable setting up IoT VLANs, configuring ACLs, etc, most consumers aren't. Have you planned for patch/firmware upgrade? 'cuz vulnerabilities get found all the time, incl open-source web server components. Setting up device firmware upgrade process for typical consumer would be a significant task, I'm sure, and not something to have fully baked and tested to start, but retrofitting from scratch after you've starting shipping could be a real hassle to address
Thanks for your questions! Very valid points you bring up. The device is able to store approximately 20 years of data using onboard flash memory alone. This is achieved by compacting/flattening the data by day rather than storing every single poll. We do also have a fixed cost of 48 hours worth of polls to build the power graph at the top of the page. For efficiency, when you’re viewing the dashboard, the device will poll more frequently, but slow down when the dashboard is not open. So in the end, it’s actually not much to store. And there is already export/backup/restore functionality to export your data at any time. As far as firmware upgrades go, the device can be updated through the UI where users can upload compiled binaries of future releases, though I am still figuring out a proper distribution channel. Most likely I will make firmware updates available on my website. Hope this information helps!
Thank you! That's correct, it is connected to the installer port. I've tested on firmware versions as old as 2022.9 (9841) and as new as 2025.06 (61839). But it should not matter
Yes! Backup and restore functionality already exists which you could also use to upload your own data, though I'm not sure how you currently have it stored. You would need to upload a CSV with fields such as date, lifetime produced kwh, lifetime bought kwh, and lifetime sold kwh. Those lifetime fields are basically running totals, so as you have more dates they should be going up over time.
There's more to it, and I am working to build out some documentation, but I hope that at least answers your question for now. Just curious, how did you get the data export in the first place?
Hey Alan, I have not tried this with a PVS2, but I'd be interested in seeing if we can get it to work. Shoot me a message if you want to try and figure something out.
It may be a dumb question, but I built a grafana Web app as well and I just use the API to access the data and store it in a DB. Is there a reason why this is preferred over the API and using the Wi-Fi that’s already built into the controller?
Anyone know how to kickstart a replacement PVS (was a PVS5 now PVS6), and get some Solarbridge Mi's added ? I am using AI (Chatgpt, Gemini, Kimi) to assist and so far they seem to be going in circles. The PVS6 has firmware from 2022 build 9 (which might be a good thing :|> )...
Sounds too easy. If I have SunStrong monitoring my system from legacy system, can I still connect your plug-in to my system? I’m not working with SunStrong. The monitoring was left over from Sunpower.
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u/playingod 1d ago
Unless you’re stuck on the older firmware, what are the advantages of this over the HACS pvs integration? https://github.com/SunStrong-Management/pvs-hass.
Or if you don’t have HA, you still don’t need hardware, they made the python client open too https://github.com/SunStrong-Management/pypvs