Ask HN: Am I the only one who does not want IoT in their solar panel setup?
All solar panel systems I can find seem to require an internet connection. The (seemingly) best option I have found so far is a system with an inverter that only requires an internet connection during the initial installation, which uses a wifi dongle so I can probably unplug that afterwards. Even then, the manufacturer states that not having it connected to the internet voids their warranty, and I'm afraid the software might even have some kind of countdown where the system will stop working when it hasn't been connected to the internet after a certain amount of time.
I am not interested at all in connecting something that should help me get off the grid to the internet. Combine that with security issues[0] and I'm starting to think we're collectively folding our arms behind our back and intentionally falling forwards.
Maybe I'm too paranoid. Thoughts?
[0]: For example: https://csirt.divd.nl/cases/DIVD-2022-00009/
202 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threada person that knows how to "DIY" these things correctly already knows how to use a microcontroller to log the data and either present it or send it somewhere that can present it.
If you're off grid, you can easily get away with not having that sort of thing.
Or, just an automatic firmware "update." Most are made in a country that we are not currently on very good terms with. No, I don't trust any that require internet access, or an "account" of some sort to activate it.
My installer said that they need access to the inverter during set-up in order to configure it properly, but after that it could be disconnected.
Personally, I use it to get firmware updates and to use the API in order to monitor it.
Although, that said, I'm not sure what sort of security issues you're imagining. There's no privacy issue - the inverter only has data on what you've generated.
There are devices that can monitor your breaker box and tell you when appliances have turned on.
You could perhaps prevent this by having it dump everything between the meter and the house so it can't tell if it's going to the grid or not. I don't know enough about it to say if that's reasonable.
Or that a potential fault won't be identified and the owner won't be alerted.
There are risks on both sides. But, in the UK at least, there are several inverters which don't require an IP address.
Don't buy internet connected appliances.
No, I'll just use the remote.
An acquaintance was telling me about the new RV she and her husband bought. It has a brake controller for trailer brakes. Not unusual, I have them on two of my vehicles; there's a big lever to manually apply the brakes and a "gain" control to adjust how rapidly they apply. But her RV's brake controller is only controllable through a smartphone, apparently.
A few years ago I went to the store to buy a new alarm clock. All the clocks they had for sale were just Bluetooth accessories for a smartphone. Not particularly useful when there's no smartphone to link to it, and ignoring the question of why you wouldn't just use the phone's alarm instead.
Here's a Fronius document on the remote disconnect API setup:
[PDF] https://www.fronius.com/~/downloads/Solar%20Energy/Quick%20G...
"This Application Guide describes the procedure to setup a Fronius inverter system to comply with the SA Smarter Homes regulation of remote disconnect/reconnect when selecting the “SA Power Networks / Fronius –Fronius – API control of internet connected Fronius” Relevant Agent option."
Here's a Fronius webinar (audio with slides, hour long) discussing the remote disconnect functions, jump to 2:42 if the link doesn't automatically take you there. The first couple of minutes should give the overview:
https://youtu.be/KR8jxANwii4?t=162
If I'd known in advance it'd have multiple Internet of Shit crapware devices attached that'll probably stop working in 5 years and require expensive replacement and renovation to keep working past that, and that it can't produce power at all unless those pieces of near-future landfill rubbish are happy, I'd 1000% never have gotten it.
Mea culpa—I guess I should have asked, but it just never occurred to me—but I'm fucking never getting another solar system unless I install it myself. There are other problems (that have solidified my usual preference not to let someone else GC a project for me, because they usually just skim money and do a terrible job—they fucked up our roof bad, for one thing, many thousands of dollars of damage so now we get to sort that out too, the hassle's not worth a few hundred in savings per year assuming all else goes well which at this point I'm sure it will not) but IoT shitware would have been a deal-breaker on its own if I'd known it required that to function, not just for monitoring or whatever.
There's so much demand in their industry that all the best people are working on high paying corporate job sites (like building hospitals and new FAANG campuses), that the average homeowner is left dealing with garbage companies who treat their clients like shit.
Hopefully rising mortgage rates and falling house prices can cool demand a little and we can get some decently competent contractors again.
WRT solar, I was super impressed with jerryrigeverything's solar installation that he did himself. Basically you can get a kit that you install yourself and it's much cheaper than having a garbage contractor rip you off and ruin your roof in the process.
His video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSa1tvrrFZg
I'd rejected GC bids for things before because they were crazy-expensive and they were proposing mediocre work despite their very high rate, then gone on to basically GC the project myself, engaging contractors for most of it and DIYing a few things here and there, and those have all been great. My mistake was making an exception this time, I guess, but OTOH the savings from solar also wouldn't have been worth it if I'd had to do that, even with a hypothetically-cheaper installation cost, so I'd not have done the project at all in that case.
As it is I don't see how the system won't end up losing us money by the time everything's accounted. Probably 5-10 years off our roof lifetime even if they fix all the acute damage but don't do a full replacement (I very much doubt they'll do that without us spending more money fighting for it than it's worth), plus it'll cost more to replace when it's time because of the damn panels.
But they didn't like our proposal that they take it all down (which they'll have to do to fix the roof anyway—it's bad), fix our roof, take all the equipment back and zero out our bill so we can all pretend this never happened. Sigh.
Been up for weeks and still hasn't generated a single goddamn watt of power so far, either. The IoT shitware refuses to do its job and of course they're not in any hurry to get out and fix it. Pretty sure it's gonna end up with attorneys involved, which is something I've managed to avoid my whole life so far and I'm dreading.
Blue Raven Solar, for the record. May as well name-n-shame, but my understanding is this kind of thing's extremely common in the solar industry so it's not just them. I suspect heavily-astroturfed reviews, in their case. Again, I really should have known better.
One point of advice for others: call out a roof person you trust before starting one of these projects. Ours, it turns out, would have told us our roof was too steep to safely install solar on without totally fucking up the shingles in the process, and that would have been the end of it.
[EDIT] Heh, incidentally I think the near-impossibility of putting the panels back up without wrecking the roof again is what might save us and get them to back out the whole project. IDK how they're gonna re-install the system after the roof's fixed.
I would get legal involved sooner rather than later; but a good lawyer can be as hard to find as a good GC.
Maybe you should just get the roof fixed and sell the house and try again.
LOL, the "unplug it and plug it back in" of major house mistakes, I guess.
You can hire a home inspector after it's "fixed" and see what he says. Just disclose that you have solar and that you had an issue and it was resolved, provide paperwork, and most people will yawn.
They're not actually liable for anything more detailed than what you could notice yourself, which... why are you paying them again?
Most folks are pretty bad at spotting problems with houses, because they simply don't know what to look for (and why would they? It's hard to know everything), so an inspector's probably a good idea.
Me, I spend the entire time at an AirBnB distracted by noticing every single place work wasn't done quite right, every cut corner or lazy shortcut, every interesting (or "interesting") material choice, "oh, looks like they replaced this shower insert but didn't want to fully redo the drywall so took the lazy route and added trim", "uh oh, this tile shower floor has serious drainage problems", "interesting, this doorway must have been added", et c., but most people aren't like that.
But if they don't see anything wrong, then any other ones won't see anything, either.
Lesson learned from watching my parents build a home & personal projects: treat any payment of funds as a sign off on the work and expect you'll never hear from them again.
If a GC baulks at 1/2 withheld until completion/inspection, move on.
If you have any concerns about the quality of work, refuse to pay until it's completed.
Will Prowse on Youtube has great videos on off grid solar including equipment that is all UL certified. Getting over the hurdle of roof mounting panels or ground mounting up to code (seems to mainly be around using conduit for the wiring), I could buy a pallet of 10 solar panels, a converter/invetor all in one from EG4, and an EG4 5kw lithium iron phosphate battery for around $6000.
Battery: https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-lifepower4-lithium-battery-48... Offgrid Converter: https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-6-5k-off-grid-inverter-6500ex...
I’m kinda with you on building my own off grid system - but, I don’t think I would’ve had the know how of where to start without the knowledge I got from getting my Tesla system installed.
"If you want to get a rooftop solar system that powers your home with the grid down, you can do it! The hardware is out there. But such a system will be significantly more expensive than a normal grid tied system, and it will likely never “pay off” in terms of money saved."
That may be true if he was paying $0.10 kw/hr in Idaho, but that's definitely false for a few reasons.
-In California, it's $0.43 kw/hr so the ROI for solar+battery is getting much faster with the price of panels, inverter, battery coming down. Price of electricity will continue to go up in the short term.
-A lithium iron phosphate EG4 5kw/hr battery for $1600, or even an EcoFlow Delta Pro for $2500 is a good deal considering around 8000 discharge cycles
-Most critically, net metering (grid tie) means that all that excess solar power you are producing in the middle of the day is being bought back by the power company at CHEAPER rates than what you are paying, so that needs to be accounted for in grid-tie vs off-grid pricing. If you are off-grid producing x amount of your power needs and you are using 100% of that power via lithium battery (at night), you are getting full retail price for producing your own power at $0.43 kw/hr or $0.49 kw/hr peak rate from 5-9pm in California. Off-grid doesn't mean truly off grid if you already have electric hookup, it just means an off-grid panel for some or most of your house. Think of it like this... if you have 15 solar panels grid-tied, you are being "taxed" ~4 panels by your power company.
PGE is ridiculous. But apparently whatever serves San Diego is even worse.
There's Silicon Valley Power, with rates that are a fraction of PG&E's, smack in the middle of the Bay Area. Can get as low as $.10 Kw/h during off peak hours.
Confusingly when I moved to Oregon years ago, its PGE (without the ampersand) for Portland General Electric.
You could go off-grid to avoid this, or install your own batteries, but both of those are obviously expensive and inconvenient in their own ways.
I'm not saying they got the price right ($10/kWh) or the model (more for larger arrays), but the overall principal is fine.
I think you can definitely argue about the specific values they chose, but the broad strokes make sense.
2)People providing green energy into the grid should not be charged more than others.
And tbh if enough people go off grid I expect the state to enact a "grid tax" that every homeowner has to pay, regardless of if they're connected, because otherwise electricity costs for on grid users would skyrocket as fixed costs are spread between fewer users.
Electricity in CA is already 3x the rate of rural Wyoming or Arkansas or what have you. Why exactly are their fixed costs so high, and why is it the responsibility of individuals capable of generating power more efficiently to subsidize that ineptitude?
Now I don't actually know if CPUC actually stuck the landing here. The proposed rulemaking is a pretty dense document and it seems non-trivial to model costs from parsing that.
> I could buy a pallet of 10 solar panels, a converter/invetor all in one from EG4, and an EG4 5kw lithium iron phosphate battery for around $6000.
3.7 kW of panels (assuming these are 370 watt panels like you mentioned above) and 5 kWh of storage is not going to go very far in an off-grid system unless your electric use is pretty low. The thing about going completely off-grid is that you need a substantially larger system than in a grid-tied scenario both in terms of generation and storage.
My furnace and AC have no internet connection; the thermostat I installed myself does.
None of which is exceptionally amazing and if it annoys me it gets replaced with a mercury switch.
Since I’m WFH and the house is always occupied and it has one zone none of the supposed energy saving stuff really applies.
You could also connect it to a guest wifi network.
The data it provides is rather useful as you can see the efficiency of each panel - useful to know when they need a cleaning :)
btw, my panel disconnected from wifi for a month and nobody said anything.
I was aware that my inverter could connect to the Internet, and probably would be connected to the Internet during setup, but my full intention was to disconnect it following the install. I was pretty happy that the one that the vendor gave me was poll-able from an internal Web server, so I could scrape the metrics myself.
It turns out, none of this was to be. I found out about the Internet connectivity requirement for the warranty _after_ it was on my wall and producing power - and when you've spent five figures on a system with a 25-year warranty, unfortunately I had to suck up my pride and let it phone home to the manufacturer's cloud. It now sits on a separate VLAN for "untrusted" devices.
What's more, I also found out that the manufacturer had intentionally removed the local web server feature, instead making it totally reliant on the cloud service for metrics. It has a laughable rate limit of 300 calls per day, which gives me roughly 5-minute granularity (I could get better granularity if I made my metrics-gathering scripts poll differently overnight, but still), and I really dislike having to reach out to a vendor for data that's produced in my own home.
I have setup my SolarEdge system 4 years ago, (HDWave with an LCD) and never did I sign anything that stated 'must be connected to internet, or else', again not even possible with European warranty laws anyway, as the vendor has to prove that the malfunction occurred due to not being connected to the internet.
When I was doing research on inverters and the control units, I looked into a few systems. Back then, you had either string based (Sunny boy, GoodWe was what was standard offered) or per panel inverters/optimizers.
Some vendors of those setups even wanted to place an (additional) router! Maybe to ensure the wifi signal from the inverter was close, though they wanted to place it in the meetering cabinet. No way of course. Are you crazy?
The Enphase control boxes where the worst, that still stick with me today. They actually setup a VPN to their mothership, and use that to be always connected, completely unacceptable of course. Just think about it, joe schmoe gets a solar setup, happily lets it connect to the internet, and then exposes his entire home network to Enphase.
SolarEdge was the least worry some, as (after research) showed they have a USB/RS-232 and RS-485 internal port that can be used (https://github.com/jbuehl/solaredge) and I've been using that to scrap the data for years.
I do know that with the newer HDWave (without LCD) things are a bit trickier, but should still have those RS-485 connectors, as those are needed for other purposes. Of course, I don't know what software updates broke over the years.
My system has _never_ connected to the internet, and is happily humming along :)
All in all, this is completely unacceptable behavior, and I'm surprised that they keep on getting away with this. Installers think its great, they show up to give you an offer, and show how great some of their customer setups are functioning, because yes, they also keep having 'full admin' access. Insane.
Not only due to the obvious security, privacy and availability problems, but because the lifetime of apps is very short in the grand scheme of things.
I'll bet there is zero chance a phone app for a solar install today is still going to be working in the 25 year lifetime of that solar panel system.
Right, because I really want to have to take out my phone, unlock it, click an app icon, wait for it to load and authenticate my credentials (assuming I'm not forced to sign in -- again), find the arm/disarm button in some cluttered UI, and then click the button. As opposed to just pulling out the key fob and clicking the arm/disarm button? No apps, please.
I feel like modern-day developers have effectively forgotten how to do local network communication. I know about NAT traversal and similar problems, but you can still architect your system in such a way that your cloud backend is a dumb NAT traversal helper/proxy, which then makes it trivial for your client to offer a cloud-less, local connection option for those users that know how to forward ports/have IPv6/etc (or when you go out of business and your cloud service goes offline).
However, the only interface to its control box/recorder is through a plugin for Internet Explorer 7. I have to access it through a virtual machine running Windows XP.
I've replaced a bunch of various appliances and etc, furnace, hot water heater, washer and etc. All have various internet connectivity options but they're all OPTIONAL. They are there at least from the start as an option for the owner to participate in, in exchange for some level of convince. That seems like a premise I would also expect from a solar panel setup ...
Problem is that consumers really do see "internet/mobile connected" as a desirable feature even if they're just going to use it once for the novelty and then forget about it.
This is an interesting comment and from my experience I'm sure it's often true.
Around 2008 or thereabouts I was the lead engineer on my company's first foray into what is now called IIoT: Industrial Internet of Things. At the time we just called it Remote Monitoring. There was (is?) even an magazine by that name.
We built large, complex medical instruments that required periodic servicing both by the customer and by our Field Engineers. Engineering's value proposition for the project to the Technical Support/Field Service group was that we could reduce the frequency of expensive and unscheduled field service callouts and provide considerably more debug information from an instrument when a customer called in with a problem. We should be able to reduce diagnosing an instrument failure from hours to minutes. And in the future, we'd probably be able to tell when a consumable part was due for replacement and schedule it ahead of time.
It was a freaking battle uphill both ways in the snow to get them to accept that. All they wanted was a slightly faster version of the tool they already had which was already inadequate for the task. They couldn't actually stop us from implementing this, but there a a strong reluctance to the point of "well it sounds nice but I don't see how it would be helpful to us."
Postmortem:
Fast forward two years. The system is in the field. Tech support keeps telling us how they can't imagine that they were able to get along without it and keep asking for new features!
I dunno about much of the rest of the world, but in Australian Consumer Law such a declaration would certainly be unlawful.
And you can be hella sure they'll default to any excuse not to honor their warranty, because they know that you'll probably not bother fighting them in small claims court.
[PDF] https://www.fronius.com/~/downloads/Solar%20Energy/Quick%20G...
(Mind you, I would still expect this to be completely distinct from anything about voiding a manufacturer’s warranty even if it was a grid-connected system which is probably but not necessarily the case.)
When I had my solar installed I had no internet connection at the property, so the installer gave me instructions of how to pair the inverter when I did. I had a smart meter which gave hourly data, so there wasn't really much need in connecting the inverter up. It has indicator lights to tell you when something goes wrong.
i.e. after a few years, you will not be able to re-setup your inverter again.
New home owners would not have the app previously installed, so it would still suck for them.
That said we shouldn’t reserve the “IoT” moniker for crappy cloud based things requiring constant internet connections to work. That’s the internet of shit (as popularized by https://mobile.twitter.com/internetofshit)
I definitely want some connectivity in a solar panel setup. But in the case of a solar panel array there is no point for that connectivity to use be more than local, or offer more than simple monitoring. A local polling api that offers a simple json blob with stats? Does that qualify as “IoT”?
It is sometimes accompanied by a local API that works without internet (Apple HomeKit stuff seems to somewhat work sometimes in an internet outage, and the Hue buttons keep working).
It can be quite hard to distinguish the two.
It's ironic to see on this same HN front page a story about police & face recognition. We should oppose all forms of social credit / new world order / cashless / corporate fascism.
It shouldn't just be "the police are bad, so let's deny them this tool," it's "the police will just enlist private companies to do their dirty work for them, so let's deny everyone this tool."
Example: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/09/us/politics/trump-twitter...
Twitter is a third party but a court ruled that Trump blocking critics violated their first amendment rights.
It is simple enough to ban the government from using AI in the process of law enforcement and that ban would extend to whomever they enlisted to help them.
If you worded the statute correctly.
There was an ethernet cable plugged into the inverter panel, which ran to a Comcast box.
We switched to FIOS after a couple of months, and never switched the connectivity of the solar panels. Everything worked fine, but ...
A few months later, I received a strongly worded email from an organization I had never heard of, saying that I needed to get the solar panels back online, because it was a requirement of the contract the previous owner had entered into to sell the SRECs generated by the panels. Failing to connect the panels to the Internet could lead them to pursue action related to a lien they had on our property.
Wait, what contract? And what lien? This was the first I'd heard of either, and the lien hadn't come up during the title-insurance process.
It turns out the previous owner of the house had entered into a contract with an organization in our state that pays you a lump sum, if you sign away the rights to the SRECs your system generates. The owner had used that lump sum to help pay for the panels.
But then he sold the house to my wife and me, without ever disclosing the existence of the contract. So basically he sold the SRECs to both of us. He sold them to the organization by virtue of their contract, and he sold them to us, by virtue of the ownership of the panels transferring to us when we bought the house.
And the lien never came up because it was not against the real estate itself; rather, it was against the SRECs -- the Solar Renewable Energy Credits that are generated by the panels. They're not physical assets, but they do have substantial value.
It took the retention of a lawyer and a whole bunch of back-and-forth between us, the seller, our buyer and seller's agents, the lawyer who handled our settlement, and the SREC-buying organization to get the whole mess sorted out.
In the end, we got the lien and contract dissolved ... and then we hooked the panels up to FIOS, and I get handy little charts of all the SRECs we're generating :)
I'd probably lose out on $500 per year from my system if I didn't sell them. At this point, though, it might _actually_ be asking the question of how much I value my privacy.
Just like if Tesla didn't sell electric vehicle credits to other manufacturers, those companies would have to find other solutions to comply.
If your base assumption is that nobody is going to lift a finger for the common good, than the purpose of SRECs is so that a polluting Bitcoin miner pays you to put solar panels on your home, so that you get some good out of it and we don't all have an incentive to be polluting Bitcoin miners.
People who believe that everyone will naturally do the right thing out of the goodness of their hearts are often nicer to be around, but tend to get screwed by their inaccurate view of reality.
My state doesn't have time-of-use based pricing, but I do see this as one particularly effective way of shifting load (not installed capacity!) towards more emissions-friendly sources. The sun shines on home solar panels while we're not home; then absent any other incentives, we come home in the dark and do all sorts of energy-intense activities, like heating rooms and cooking dinner.
(FWIW, I'm not anti-solar at all, but I am a realist, and spent six years in the utility/commercial solar industry.
I'd be curious how the state organization thought they had cause to pursue you?
How is that not the seller not lying about property (they didn't own the panels free and clear) and thus liable for effectively selling stolen property? In which case, state organization would be free to sue the seller, and you have no part in the proceedings.
What laws did it end up turning on?
And water rights, but mostly a west-of-the-Mississippi thing?
I daresay this title company will now be on the lookout for things like this!
What the seller SHOULD have done is informed us that the contract would have to be transferred to us as part of the home sale, and we would have factored that into our offer.
But because they failed to inform us, they ended up selling the same property to two different parties.
And you're also correct that we were never a party to the contract, and that's basically what our lawyer spelled out in our demand letter. He basically said that this was a breach of contract between the previous owner and the organization (the two parties to the contract), and they needed to handle it themselves and leave us out of it.
Eventually, after a lot of back-and-forth, the organization agreed to not pursue this any further with us and nullify the lien. They had the option to pursue the previous owner for breach of contract, which would likely have involved him returning the money, but I don't know if they actually did so or chalked it up as a loss.
We purchased a house, and within just days, the basement flooded because cleaning wipes were flushed down the toilet by the prior owner, clogging the system. So the sellers knew about the flooding or they flushed the stuff while moving out. It wasn't covered under any clause by interpretation, although it should have been by literal reading of the contract. Seller's can basically do whatever they want besides burn the house down.
Yes. They aren't using these features to serve you ads. They aren't using them to lock you in to their platform. They added these features because the vast majority of users are not particularly technical and they want some dashboard they can login to to see some cute metrics about their system. They added these features because downtime alerts are genuinely useful but it is difficult to implement without some sort of remote connectivity. And if your local utility needs the data for some reason, or needs the ability to coordinate power delivery to the grid, either now or in the future, there is a mechanism in which they can do so.
The number of users who consider this an anti-feature is such a small minority of users that it isn't really worth their time to accommodate. IOT certainly has its issues. TVs absolutely don't need it. For other appliances it can be a toss up. But there are also genuine use cases for it.
Yet.
Experience tells me that everything will eventually turn into an ad or data collection platform.
Furthermore, even if there is indeed no nefarious intent from the third-party collecting & storing your system's telemetry, if you don't get any benefit from it, why give it to them? It's still a risk they (or a some malicious attacker, or the government) use this data in the future in a way you didn't expect.
It's not always advertisements. Sometimes, the company will hire some oxygen waster that wants to boost "engagement" in order to justify their job and salary, so now your system is using your telemetry data to find ways to waste your time (as well as track whether they've indeed managed to waste it) even though advertisements themselves aren't (yet) involved.
Not to mention, advertisements don't have to be served over the same device that collects the data. The inverter company can very well collect the data, sell it to a data broker where other ad companies will use this data.
Will it work on the micro level of an individual home? Maybe, maybe not, but the potential for that data to be used to model behavior is definitely there.
Data brokers accumulate various bits of data that are unreliable and useless on their own but in aggregate they can be used to "connect the dots". If an IP address & user agent pair or tracking cookie only lights up when the solar system detects significant power draw suggesting someone is at home, you can tie a pseudonymous IP or tracking cookie to the solar system data which presumably would include name or some other bit of identifying info.
Now repeat that with all the other information you've got and you're able to paint a very detailed profile off someone.
And again, the solar data by itself is going to be nearly useless as it is entirely a function of the irradiance on the panels, and does nothing to reveal customer behavior.
But the lock-in is there regardless of whether they intended it or not. And, by they way, you are insane if you actually believe they do not intend a lock-in, given that they're making direct (and probably illegal) threats to "void the warranty" if you don't stay connected.
If they go out of business in 5 or 10 years, and your system stops working, you are screwed. The same applies if they just decide it's no longer profitable to support old products. Even if they are still in business, they are not going to do anything whatsoever to help you keep running without them.
The fact that most users are stupid enough to sign up under those circumstances doesn't change the fact that it's a stupid thing to do.
Are you familiar with these systems at all? You can't lock someone into an inverter brand. If you don't like your current inverter, you just buy a new one and plug it into your system.
> If they go out of business in 5 or 10 years, and your system stops working, you are screwed.
I work in the industry. I can assure you that won't happen. These are not fly by night VC funded IOT companies selling $100 trinkets. The industry went through a rough patch ~5 years ago, a fair number of restructuring. Literally zero incidents where products were EOL'ed due to remote servers turning off. There are a number of reasons for this, I can go into more detail if you really want me to. But the gist of it is that these are revenue generating assets many of which have large financial institutions holding the bag. They have the leverage to make sure that these types of systems never turn off.
Challenge accepted. Just sell a fully integrated system that refuses to do anything if the incorrect inverter is connected.
EDIT: And the more I think about, it is very unlikely that you could do the same to an inverter. You could certainly brick the control electronics, but the power electronics, the stuff that matters, it would be difficult. So snipping a few wires and swapping out some boards is probably sufficient.
How about this, if anyone on this thread ever has their inverter remotely shut off because a company goes out of business, I will personally volunteer to develop a work around.
Unless everything speaks standard protocols and can easily be swapped to a different control and monitoring system (including one the owner runs locally if they want to do that), you can lock somebody into a subscription, on pain of having to replace an expensive durable asset that should otherwise last a LONG time and requires expensive skilled labor to swap out.
And, without having read the ToS, I have a suspicion that you can also Alter the Deal under which that service is provided.
> The industry went through a rough patch ~5 years ago, a fair number of restructuring. Literally zero incidents where products were EOL'ed due to remote servers turning off.
5 years ago, how many installed, Internet-connected systems were already 5 or 10 years old? How many different backends were supporting them?
> But the gist of it is that these are revenue generating assets many of which have large financial institutions holding the bag.
I accept that that reduces the chance of them being turned off. I would in fact be interested in hearing more about this revenue model.
Of course, you now have me worried about the risks of them being remotely meddled with in various ways to suit the interests of whoever is providing this revenue. It's usually a bad sign if you buy something, but somebody else thinks it's still their "revenue generating asset".
We are taking about AC and DC current. That is about as "standard" as it gets. Your panels produce DC current. Your inverter takes that current and converts it to AC. The AC current is then sent to your main panel. The inverter is a fraction of the cost of the entire system, and most inverters only last 8-10 years, so they are expected to be replaced a few times through out the lifetime of the system. It would be physically impossible to implement some sort of inverter level DRM that could then bind up your entire system. You could brick the inverter itself, but for reasons explained below that would be very unlikely.
> I accept that that reduces the chance of them being turned off. I would in fact be interested in hearing more about this revenue model.
I don't know the exact number, but the overwhelming majority of residential solar systems are financed, either through a lease or a PPA. The banks that offer this financing maintain lists of "bankable" equipment and in order to be eligible for financing the equipment used in a project needs to be on one of these lists. And to get on these lists manufacturers need to meet a number of requirements, one of which is that there are guarantees that in the event of a bankruptcy the equipment will continue to operate and that warranties will still be honored.
> Of course, you now have me worried about the risks of them being remotely meddled with in various ways to suit the interests of whoever is providing this revenue
That is a fair concern. But if you enter into a financial contract with an entity that has the ability and standing to shut off your solar system for whatever reason, then that is your own problem, and somewhat tangential from the topic in this thread. And FWIW, in practice it very rarely makes sense to turn these things off. It costs too much to repossess them, and the homeowner will just end up putting more money towards the utility bill to keep the lights on. Instead they just keep the electrons flowing and hope their collections department can sort things out.
On the other hand, if something bad happens (virus, remote bricking, disabling some functionality that was in the contract in un update), you can probably sue them. Granted, if they face massive service disruption, you may not be able to gain much from it.