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Can someone who has a solar inverter explain why these are connected to the internet?
by tdeck 2y ago
Can someone who has a solar inverter explain why these are connected to the internet?
- 4ntiq 2y ago[flagged]
- marviel 2y agoUnless I'm missing some hidden joke; this attitude is misanthropic. I'd like to see less of it in general, but I'd especially like to see less of it here.
- 4ntiq 2y ago[flagged]
- do_not_redeem 2y agoThis is a very uncharitable and hatingly-blinded take.
- 4ntiq 2y ago[flagged]
- reaperducer 2y agoI'm reading this article and grinning, because someone somewhere at Deye knows they sold these inverters fraudulently. Some sales person out there just went into full ah-fuck-it mode and delivered shipments and shipments of these things. NICE. This user's biography reads, "you are the least qualified to comment on the subject" Sounds about right.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 4ntiq 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hrkfmud50k 2y agobecause they have remote configuration and reporting on solar production, consumption, battery state of charge, grid export, import vs time.
- HarryHirsch 2y agoPractical Engineering had a video on the subject not too long ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G4ipM2qjfw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G4ipM2qjfw The short answer is: it's for load balancing, it can't be avoided.
- viraptor 2y agoThat part is independent of internet connection. Especially since you can't rely on the internet connection in case of power delivery issues. It's a completely different network.
- HarryHirsch 2y agoThe trouble is that there needs to be some way for the grid operator to take x % of generating capability off-line or bring y % more on-line, and the panels themselves can't decide autonomously, so there must be an external data connection. Maybe not through internet but cellphone data connection, but the grid operator has to have control about how much power goes into the grid.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Dylan16807 2y agoThat's true when there's a sufficient density of home solar panels. If they add up to a percent or two of the local grid, then control is not necessary. Also you could design a solar system to not backfeed.
- ssl-3 2y agoThey don't need that kind of control, as evidenced by the fact that this kind of control is largely absent today for residential-scale grid-tied solar installations. The way it works today for common residential grid-ties is this: 1. Is grid up? Y/N 2. If Y, then supply excess locally-generated power to grid. (Someone will implicitly use it.) 3. If N, then turn off connection to grid. (Nobody's home and we don't want to hurt anybody.)
- viraptor 2y agoUsually you want some way of monitoring how much energy your panels are producing. This helps to realise you need to clean the panels or do some maintenance if panels start failing. Or it may be useful for scheduling home appliance usage. But in practice this almost always means connecting to the internet, because the simplest interface is wifi and data collection/display at the producer's servers. So any extra features == internet connection.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y agoWhat would be a good method for keeping the IoT Thing from talking to a machine beyond my locally administered network?
- viraptor 2y agoNever connect it to the WiFi/Ethernet? Or if you do, filter the traffic. Unfortunately that's often not possible on consumer class modems.
- lazide 2y agoOften the equipment won’t actually work either if you try to filter it meaningfully. I’ve had IoT cameras (in particular) that would brick themselves if you didn’t allow 443 to all Amazon IP blocks. :s
- wmf 2y agoA firewall.
- sedro 2y agoA separate VLAN, if your router is capable
- ndriscoll 2y agoDon't plug it in unless you have the expertise to already know the answer to that question. That should also be your advice to any friends/family. Plugging something like this into a network is a horrifically bad idea. This is like asking people on the Internet how to safely mix random household cleaning chemicals. If you don't have the background to answer that yourself, you should not be doing household chemistry.
- layoric 2y agoMainly data collection (previous lead dev at solar forecasting startup). All the web UIs to view usage are also collecting useful information that can be used in forecasting models. One of the researches I worked with wrote some papers on using distributed home solar output measurements to assist with generating higher resolution irradiance forecasts and estimated actuals/observations. You have to do a lot of data cleaning to get this reliable though. Anyway, this data from memory was bought/sold for various research/commercial weather modeling.
- lxgr 2y agoBesides the reasons others have already mentioned, load management comes to mind: Getting rid of excess energy in the grid can be just as hard a problem to solve as to deal with excess load, and being able to simply and very quickly remove some supply from the grid is very useful for that.
- bartvk 2y agoIt's just a bad idea. I got caught up in a situation where one company sold me a solar installation, then a subcontractor installed and configured it. Apparently they got into a spat about money, because the subcontractor told me to pay the bill straight to them. Otherwise they'd shut down the newly installed solar installation. I said, can you do that? Of course while talking, I changed the WiFi password.
- bennettnate5 2y agoSolar installations are expensive enough that some manufacturers can probably afford to integrate a cellular modem into the product (similar to how all new cars do it today). Good luck changing the Wi-Fi password on that!
- bartvk 2y agoThat's a very good point, and I don't like it.
- Loughla 2y agoI'm not sure any company does that though. They're operating on pretty slim margins from what I understand, unless I'm wrong. Adding completely unused features just for fun isn't really a common business practice?
- Schiendelman 2y agoEnphase does, as noted elsewhere in the dicussion on this post!
- 15155 2y agoNothing a quick antenna desolder job or trace cut to shut that little vector down.
- account42 2y agoThey can just program the device to shut down automatically if it can't ping home for some time. Marketing will call it a safety feature.
- plagiarist 2y agoToo many idiots have bought internet-connected devices so now the inertia is in favor of the corporations to continue selling that.
- nunez 2y agoHi, idiot here. I badly wanted a US-made robot vacuum that uses LiDAR for mapping and a camera for object classification. This does not exist. Your only options are Chinese-owned-and-operated. I could flash them with Valetudo and wire them up to Home Assistant, but doing so requires me to solder shit to the JTAG circuit and buy some niche hardware, which requires me to open up the vac and potentially brick it. I'm not risking that on a $1200 device.
- plagiarist 2y agoI understand you're offended but this is exactly what I mean. The US-made robot that uses LiDAR for mapping and a camera for object detection will never exist because people will pay $1,200 and still allow a random company to map and photograph their home.
- nunez 2y agoNot offended. You're not wrong. I'm upset that my options here were a potential security risk with a difficult/risky workaround vs vastly inferior products. I would have gladly paid more for an American alternative if it existed.
- greenthrow 2y agoIt's really nice to be able to check whether the state of your power is at home before you go there if there's a question.
- whitehexagon 2y agoI have a Axpert MAX E. It has a WiFi AP constantly advertised. The only way to configure/disable that is via a .cn app! The app also allows remote control and monitoring of the inverter, via some unknown cloud server. I run everything local-only, so that is never going to happen.
- gruez 2y ago> The only way to configure/disable that is via a .cn app! What does it even mean for an app to be ".cn"? Apps typically aren't identified by DNS names. Did you have to download it from a .cn domain? Is it just a roundabout way of saying the app was Chinese?
- sangnoir 2y agoIts not roundabout at all
- toast0 2y ago> Apps typically aren't identified by DNS names. Aren't they, at least on Android? The gmail app is com.google.android.gm [1], and so on. The app ids are Java style reverse ordered dns names. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.gm&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
- gruez 2y agoAccording to this definition, is there any meaningful difference between a ".cn app" and a ".com app" like com.zhiliaoapp.musically?
- danans 2y agoIt's not the solar inverters themselves that are usually internet connected, but rather the controller box (some kind of embedded system) that is internet connected to allow monitoring and control. Perhaps this manufacturer decided to economize and make both of them part of the same "box", with the result that an error condition in the controller would result in the non-operation of the inverter part. Some systems like mine (Enphase) do a good job of letting the inverters operate independently of the monitoring/control software. But to do this, I believe they need to add data storage to the inverters themselves in order to log data during a controller "outage".
- tguvot 2y agonice dashboards for information about generation. but most importantly remote troubleshooting/diagnostics. as example i have system made from multiple inverters, batteries, car charger and backup interface. after installation some stuff slightly misbehaved. manufacturer support were able to look at system logs and configuration and identify that system is slightly incorrectly wired/configured, after what installer was able to fix it. same thing goes for malfunctioning parts of system. support can take a glance at it and issue rma on spot