It's the beginning of the year and the bill from the energy supplier for the PV system on the roof arrives. More and more often, the operator is in for a rude awakening when this turns out to be significantly worse than in previous years and a high repayment is demanded. The reason: the system broke down months ago and nobody noticed!
While system operators are still euphoric in the initial phase of operating a photovoltaic system, checking and marveling almost daily at the amount of electricity and therefore money being produced from the roof, this usually diminishes considerably after a few months and is often only looked at at the end of the year, when the accounts are drawn up. If the system fails because, for example, an inverter breaks down after many years, hundreds or even thousands of euros of damage can quickly occur.
System monitoring? Unfortunately, this is often not the case with older devices because they do not have an interface or are not supported by the systems available today. Even if monitoring is connected, if you don't check it regularly or interpret the data correctly, you are not really protected against an undetected failure!
To solve this increasingly common problem, we, Q3, together with the trading company ECO MC from Neustadt an der Weinstraße, have developed a simple yet effective monitoring device called "QWATCH - the energy monitor", which can reliably register PV system failures and then send the system operator an optical, acoustic or e-mail or SMS alarm message.
The type or brand of the inverter is not relevant! The QWATCHenergy monitor is fitted with a sensor on the negative side of a DC string and monitors the current flow between the modules and the inverter. If no activity is measured for a preselectable time, the alarm message is sent. The QWATCHalso has an LED display, a beeper and a switching contact that can be used to activate a warning display in the living area, for example. The Internet connection for sending alarms is established via WLAN.
The device will be available from us or ECO MC Solartechnik from March 2022 and should be priced significantly lower than conventional system monitoring devices.
>> Further information on the QWATCHenergy monitor can be found here