Cenit: Solar Panel Monitor

Cenit reads your inverter's cloud with your own login, every few minutes, and keeps what it reads on your phone. You don't need an account to use it, and up to 3 plants is free. PANEL BY PANEL Some inverters report every panel on its own, like NEP, Hoymiles and APsystems microinverters. When production drops, you want to know whether the panels are dirty or something broke. If they all drop together, it's dust and time to wash them. If only one drops, it's that panel. Cenit shows you which on a drawing of your own roof. SolarEdge, Enphase, Huawei, Felicity, Fronius, Solis, GoodWe, Victron, Sungrow, Solarman, eGauge and Growatt's string inverters only share the total for the whole system. With those you still see production and savings, just not each panel. WHAT THE PANELS SAVE YOU Outside Mexico there's a Savings tab. Tell it what you pay per kWh and what you get for power you send to the grid, and it works out about how much your panels saved you this month and this year. It's an estimate, since only the solar side is measured. Money shows in your own currency. IN MEXICO Instead of Savings you get the DAC screen. It tells you how much room you've got before CFE moves you onto the DAC tariff, going by the 12-month rolling average. You can scan your CFE bill with the camera to pull out your kWh. HISTORY ON YOUR PHONE Readings are saved on your phone, so you can go back to any day and compare one month with another. They don't go to a server of mine unless you link the app to your company on the web (more on that below). WIDGETS AND ALERTS Put today's numbers on your home screen with a widget. The app can also tell you when a panel's been low for days, when it's time to wash them, when the inverter stops reporting while the sun's up, and in Mexico when you're getting close to DAC. It checks on its own, even with the app closed. SEVERAL ROOFS If your login sees more than one plant, like an installer's does, Plants puts them all on one screen: what they've made together today, which went quiet and which are running below normal compared with the rest, so a cloudy afternoon doesn't count as a fault. FOR INSTALLERS Projects keeps each install together: client, site survey, quote, payments, equipment, warranties and photos. Size a system from the client's bill, scan the roof's shade with the camera, and send a quote with plan A and plan B, cash or in payments, as an image or a PDF. In Mexico the CFE interconnection goes step by step, and your client can follow along with a link. If your company uses Cenit on the web, link the app and your projects, clients and photos sync there for the whole team. WHAT'S FREE Up to 3 plants is free for good, and so are quotes with Cenit's name on them. For more plants, or quotes with your own logo and colors, you pay once or monthly depending on how many plants you have: 4 to 10, 11 to 49, or 50 and up. The first month has everything open so you can try it. WHICH INVERTERS NEP, Hoymiles, APsystems, SolarEdge, Enphase, Growatt, Huawei, Felicity Solar, Fronius, Solis, GoodWe, Victron, Sungrow, Solarman and eGauge meters. Huawei doesn't even need a password, just your FusionSolar kiosk link. The app walks you through what each brand needs. Your passwords are encrypted with a key that never leaves your phone, and they only ever go to that brand's own servers. Cenit isn't made by or connected with any of these brands, and some of what it reads isn't officially documented. If a brand changes something on their side, a connection can stop working for a while. NO TRACKING There are no ads or trackers, and I don't sell your data. The app asks once whether to send anonymous events (which brand you picked, whether it connected, and what kind of error if syncing fails). It works the same if you say no, and you can switch it off under More. No inverter connected yet? Open the app and look around with example data before you decide.