Cenit: Solar Panel Monitor

Cenit reads your inverter's cloud with your own login, every few minutes, and keeps what it reads on your phone. You don't make an account with me, and up to 3 plants is free. PANEL BY PANEL Some inverters report every panel on its own, like NEP microinverters. When production drops, you want to know whether the panels are dirty or something broke. If they all drop together, it's dust and time to wash them. If only one drops, it's that panel. Cenit shows you which on a drawing of your own roof. SolarEdge, Enphase, Huawei, Felicity, Fronius, Solis, GoodWe, Victron, eGauge and Growatt's string inverters only share the total for the whole system. With those you still see production and savings, just not each panel. WHAT THE PANELS SAVE YOU Outside Mexico there's a Savings tab. Tell it what you pay per kWh and what you get for power you send to the grid, and it works out about how much your panels saved you this month and this year. It also shows how much of your solar you end up using at home. It's an estimate, because only the solar side is measured and your household use comes from the kWh you enter for each month. You can search for your location anywhere in the world, and money shows in your own currency. IN MEXICO Instead of Savings you get the DAC screen. It tells you how much room you've got before CFE moves you onto the DAC tariff, going by the 12-month rolling average. You can scan your CFE bill with the camera to pull out your kWh, and CFE's tariffs are already in the app. YOUR DAY, UP CLOSE Drag your finger along today's curve to see what the panels were making at any moment. The dashed line behind it is the most they made at that time of day over the last two weeks, so a sunny day that comes in under it means something changed. HISTORY ON YOUR PHONE Readings are saved on your phone, not on a server of mine. You can go back to any day and compare months. If you delete the app, it all goes with it, and no copy is left anywhere. WIDGETS AND ALERTS Put today's numbers on your home screen with a widget. The app can also tell you when a panel's been low for days, when it's time to wash them, when the inverter stops reporting while the sun's up, and in Mexico when you're getting close to DAC. It checks on its own, even with the app closed. And you can share how your day went as an image. SEVERAL ROOFS If your login sees more than one plant, like an installer's does, Plants puts them all on one screen: what they've made together today, which went quiet, which aren't answering, and which are running below normal compared with the rest, so a cloudy afternoon doesn't count as a fault. Up to 3 plants is free for good. For more, you pay once or monthly depending on how many you have: 4 to 10, 11 to 49, or 50 and up. The first month has every plant open so you can try it. WHICH INVERTERS NEP, Hoymiles, APsystems, SolarEdge, Enphase, Growatt, Huawei, Felicity Solar, Fronius, Solis, GoodWe, Victron and eGauge meters. Huawei doesn't even need a password, just your FusionSolar kiosk link. The app walks you through what each brand needs, including the awkward bit where you ask your installer for access. Your passwords are kept in the iOS Keychain and only ever go to that brand's own servers. Cenit isn't made by or connected with any of these brands, and some of what it reads isn't officially documented. If a brand changes something on their side, a connection can stop working for a while. NO TRACKING There are no ads or trackers, and I don't sell anything to anyone. The first time you open it, the app asks once whether you'd like to send anonymous events saying which inverter brand you picked, whether it connected and, if syncing fails, what kind of error it was. It works the same if you say no, and you can switch it off in Settings whenever you want. No inverter connected yet? Open the app and look around with example data before you decide. Terms of use: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/