I can give you a concrete example of why I have my inverters connected to a network. And I'm pretty damned hostile to network connected things in the first pla

I can give you a concrete example of why I have my inverters connected to a network. And I'm pretty damned hostile to network connected things in the first place... I built my solar array myself - a big ground mount array, string inverters[0]. This went fine, and then a few years later, I started getting arc fault warnings. These were intermittent, but the inverter would respond by shutting down entirely, then gradually ramping power back up. In the heat of summer, it would often then arc fault again and shut down. However, it ran fine for the morning, and most of the afternoon. The power cuts were sometimes dramatic, sometimes less than noticeable. But it was faulting out. Because I'd set up monitoring, I started getting emails about these events, and was able to run them down. Had I just been monitoring aggregate power use, I may very well have not noticed these. The inverters were somewhat less than helpful ("Arc Fault String A" means "Arc fault somewhere on the DC side"), and it took more than a bit of troubleshooting to run this down[1]. Eventually, thermal imaging made the problems clear - and, yes, there were real problems I was able to resolve[2]. Turns out, the panels I got cheap were a weird little niche of panels for a reason. Without monitoring, I have no idea how long it would have taken for me to find this problem. I found another problem in my system (a bad connection in another panel leading to 1/3rd of the panel not producing any output) through thermal imaging, so that was useful. But "Ensuring your solar inverters are doing what you want, without errors," is worth a good bit in a complicated system that may have 50 or 100 distinct connections, if not more, each one prone to potential problems. [0]: https://www.sevarg.net/tag/solar2020/ https://www.sevarg.net/tag/solar2020/ [1]: https://www.sevarg.net/2022/07/16/sma-sunny-boy-arc-fault-troubleshooting/ https://www.sevarg.net/2022/07/16/sma-sunny-boy-arc-fault-tr... [2]: https://www.sevarg.net/2022/07/31/journey-to-the-center-of-the-junction-box/ https://www.sevarg.net/2022/07/31/journey-to-the-center-of-t...