We’re on a mission to make the power of solar accessible to all UK households, and we know that maintenance concerns are a huge obstacle for people.

Everyone wants cheaper energy bills, but nobody wants to have to deal with the hassle of finding an engineer when things go wrong, or forking out for expensive hardware replacements.

And only a limited number of solar installers offer substantial aftercare, maintenance, or support packages.

To solve this problem, we created the Sunsave Guarantee. It’s a unique, 20-year support package for all of our Sunsave Plus customers, designed to provide complete peace of mind. And as part of this, we’ve built a shiny new monitoring tool. 

The tool helps us keep track of our solar and battery systems, and it automatically alerts us if anything’s amiss. 

Here’s a deep dive into why we built the tool and how it makes a difference for our customers.

Solar and battery monitoring is important

We always use robust kit from some of the world’s best manufacturers, but even with top-tier hardware and expert installers, issues can still arise as the years go by. 

Going solar can save you tens of thousands of pounds, but only if your system is properly maintained through its lifetime – and to know when it’s having issues, someone needs to keep an eye on it.

If problems are spotted and dealt with as soon as possible, they can usually be resolved remotely and nipped in the bud. 

But if they’re not caught early, they can result in missed savings and in-person visits from an engineer.

It's part of our Sunsave Guarantee

The current standard of maintenance available to solar homes in the UK is disappointing, and we’re here to do something about it. 

Every Sunsave Plus customer benefits from the Sunsave Guarantee, which means that if anything stops working – or even drops below an acceptable level of performance – we’ll be there to fix the issue.

Of course, your solar panel app will tell you how your system is performing, but we don’t expect you to be checking this every day – that’s our job.

We built an automated monitoring tool

Our in-house product and engineering team makes us different from most solar installers, as it means we can build cutting-edge, helpful tools for the benefit of our customers. 

To create our monitoring platform, we needed to source live performance data from every Sunsave Plus system, visualise it, and set up automatic alerts.

This data is already available on our manufacturers’ portals, and these programs all have APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) which let their software talk to ours – which meant we just needed to find a way to transfer the data.

These types of data conduits, known as Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) pipelines are common in technology companies – but among solar installers, what we've built was truly unique.

<center><em>Our monitoring tool automatically alerts us if something isn't working</em></center>

It spots problems rapidly so we can fix them

Our tool monitors the performance of every single Sunsave Plus installation every hour, 24/7.

When one of these systems isn’t working properly – whether it’s an issue with the battery, inverter, or panels – we’re automatically alerted.

Then we’ll take a look at that system in more detail to assess what’s happening.

We can then start debugging, to get the system back to its best.

Usually the first step is to contact the customer and suggest a few simple actions, such as checking the switches on their solar fuse box, and looking for any warning lights or messages on their inverter and battery screens.

We can fix many issues remotely, but if we can’t, we’ll send a technician to deal with the problem.

It's already helping our customers

We’ve seen our monitoring tool catch issues that would have otherwise been noticed much later. 

For instance, we recently spotted that a system had gone offline, so we contacted the customer. It turns out they’d switched broadband providers and their inverter had lost connection. 

After receiving a heads up from us, the customer reconnected their inverter and got their system working again.

On another occasion, we notified a customer that their battery had stopped discharging. They realised that their inverter’s circuit breaker had tripped, so they switched it back on, and the battery returned to normal. 

By catching and troubleshooting issues as soon as possible, we’re helping our customers avoid prolonged periods of system downtime and missed energy bill savings.

We're going to keep improving it

Our monitoring tool is already helping us catch problems rapidly, but our work isn’t done.

We’ll add new types of issues as we discover them, and develop new rules and alerts that let us keep track of things even more efficiently.

That’s all part of how we make sure the Sunsave Guarantee means our customers don’t have to worry, and can just sit back and enjoy the savings from clean, green energy.

Here's the story behind our monitoring tool, including why we built it, and how it's helping customers today

Alfie Ireland

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How our monitoring tool looks after our customers