Enphase is the world’s leading microinverter manufacturer, and they have always been at the forefront of solar panel monitoring. One of the most revolutionary benefits of microinverters in solar electricity systems is the ability to monitor each individual panel. Now Enphase is expanding its consumer monitoring offering to include this per-panel monitoring.

MyEnlighten Per Solar Panel Monitoring

The ability to monitor the energy production performance of each solar panel is now seen as commonplace and, in our opinion, a minimum requirement for system design and product selection. Both solar optimizers and microinverters allow for power production monitoring, but only microinverters provide both AC and DC monitoring parameters right down to the panel level. For that reason, we prefer the microinverter solution, and Enphase’s monitoring portal is second to none.

When Enphase microinverters first came to market in 2009, monitoring each panel was revolutionary. Consumers received the same per-panel monitoring capability as their installer. This actually created more problems than it solved. Empowering consumers with so much data led to confusion and unnecessary calls to the installer and the manufacturer. The solution at the time was to branch off a consumer monitoring portal called MyEnlighten that provided system overview data, but no detailed per-panel details. Installers maintained full access to per-panel data.

New consumers that were not grandfathered into the full data had the option to purchase the full Enlighten Manager web portal for their site.

Now, Enphase announced that the consumer MyEnlighten site will include summary data for each individual solar panel per day, month, year or the entire lifetime of the system. This is a great middle-of-the-road solution that gives consumers some insight without inundating them with technical data. Installers maintain an unbeatable suite of tools to analyze solar production, and the manufacturer has even more detailed insight into performance data.

As always, the Enphase system architecture allows remote updates and keeps systems running optimally.

These microinverters systems just keep getting better, and the return of per-panel system monitoring for consumers is a great improvement. Both the Enphase Enlighten app and the web portal will offer this new feature immediately.