Solar Sentry specializes in solar array diagnostics for commercial-scale solar electric sites. Most solar photovoltaic sites today collect overall energy production data and diagnostics information from the inverter(s) that connect the solar array to the power grid. While this information can help operations personnel discover and deal with major outages, significant problems in the array of solar panels often go undiagnosed, negatively impacting the production of electricity and the owners’ financial return on their investment.

Our unique patent-pending technology embeds smart wireless sensors in solar panels, allowing us to continuously evaluate individual performance and connectivity to the system. Using inexpensive wireless communications and a secure internet data channel, our diagnostic products and services collect data from each site every few minutes. This lets our analytic software pinpoint the exact location of any connection failures or underperforming solar panels and communicate actionable information to our customers, enabling them to make appropriate repairs quickly, safely and cost-effectively.

Unlike inverters that have no knowledge of the internal operation of the array of solar panels, we collect detailed granular information allowing us to pinpoint the nature and location of virtually any problem in the solar array, including:

Economic Benefit
Most commercial-scale photovoltaic power sites are underperforming by 5-10% due to undiagnosed problems in their solar arrays. Solar Sentry diagnostics and monitoring products and services provide timely email dispatch helping the owners cost-effectively reclaim this lost output.  The net result is that a small incremental investment in your solar site can have a Net Present Value of 500% or more and double its net financial return.

Courtesy of DOE/NREL, Credit - SMUD

A typical commercial-scale solar photovoltaic site has 1,000 or more solar panels (modules). With today’s monitoring solutions, significant problems in the solar array go undetected. If and when they are suspected, the absence of actionable diagnostic information forces the owner to either ignore the problem or deploy skilled technicians to the site to manually search for the problem. Both the loss of energy and the repair process are costly, raising the price per kWh and lowering site profitability. 

Awarded NYSERDA contract for clean energy business growth and development