Friday, April 25, 2008

SolarCity SolarGuard


A couple days ago, SolarCity came out and installed the SolarGuard unit. With my Xantrex inverter they can install it straight into the cabling box. It connects via serial port to the inverter and reads the status every few minutes.

The unit itself is actually quite small.


From the outside only the antenna indicates that this inverter is enabled for remote monitoring. I have quite some concerns how long this antenna will last, given that the inverter is in the side-yard of the house and we regularly run trashbins and stuff right by it. To reduce the likelihood of damage to the antenna I turned it side-ways against the recommendation of the technician.


The unit in the inverter communicates with a base station that is connected to my network. The wireless connection doesn't show up when looking for regular wireless networks. I suspect they are using ZigBee (802.15.4) for this link.

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