Who’s in Control of your Solar and Battery Setup?

* NOTES SINCE PUBLICATION * I made the comment that smart meters are connected to the Internet. But in reality, smart meters send readings to the energy supplier via a secure, dedicated network.

There are pro’s and con’s with everything and you have to make as best an informed decision as you can do. One point you missed out is the need for LOCAL control of your appliance. Its all very well having a remote control option but you absolutely must have direct local control as well as otherwise you could be looking at an expensive but useless device - whether its as simple as your internet connection goes down, the manufacturer going out of business or just the manufacturer decides to withdraw an API - Jaguar Land Rover I think recently did this resulting in their vehicles no longer being able to be eligble for the Octopus Intelligent Go tariff, and there’s a garage door manufacturer in the US that locked down remote control so you could only remotely operate your garage door via their app - which is now stuffed with adverts. Direct local control as well as cloud remote is therefore a must-have in my view (and that of many smart home experts as well)

I sometimes come here for the straight, clear presentation… even when the topic is not one that speaks to me.

Another lesson in clarity of communication. Thank you.

Great vid, Gary

Fantastic vid Gary and great to see someone finally talking about the security issue of battery systems! Well done! I recently walked away from an install because it was clear the manufacturer / supplier didn't have a clue on security. I fear it will only be a matter of time before state actors seek to implement massive widespread crippling disruption. In the meantime my search goes on for a secure offgrid battery solution that doesn't permit third party control or require internet connectivity.

I expect inverters in the future to implement some sort of role based access control that will let you decide who can see what. For instance you can grant a 3rd party provider access to only your battery charge status but not to other configurations/settings. This would be similar to what already happens in the phones: when you install an app, the app tells you what permissions it requires and you can decide which ones to grant.

My main concern is what happens if you supplier goes bust and shuts down their servers. How many systems will auto shutdown if they can't connect to the vendors servers? I'm aware some can operate temporarily offline, but not permanently. One UK based vendor has recently laid off staff and seeking further funding. We see it time and time again where "internet connected" devices become expensive paperweights. Early in 2022 200 customers in Edinburgh were disconnected from the grid due to a software "glitch" at their supplier, which was able to remotely disconnect through the smart meter.

Good video. Hopefully as we nove to more efficient usage, storage and local production, we will all be armed with our data usage over the years to make informed decisions. People still have a fear of the smart meter lying or sending misinformation. Which is laughable when you think how it used to be recorded.

Two observations. 1)before smart meters there were Economy 7 & Economy 10. Back in the 1990's I was working for an energy supplier who offered day, night and weekend day tariffs. 2) smart meters will still need to be "read" onsite periodically to check for signs of tampering.

In my recent video I compared the heating and solar industries. In it I said that Solar inverters were excellent for data acquisition and historical storage, but terrible with control options (Solaredge for instance limits the best battery options to installers). Conversely the heating industry gives the end user a lot of control over the heating system but it’s terrible with data acquisition. I’ve made two videos on redressing the balance for my heat pump already. There’s going to be a third video, I’ve been busy!

Thanks Gary for opening up this subject. My plant dashboard is hosted by the system supplier (SunSynk) and the settings are locked down by the installer - I am a bit concerned about this situation. I know the installer can allow me to login and change settings, not that I need to do this on a daily basis. My data is transmitted to Octopus via the smart meter so I don't think if I disconnected the inverter from the internet I will interrupt the supply or lose control. On the inverter there is a control panel so I can see the status of the system. However, maybe the web dashboard would not work. Any thoughts/comments welcome! 😁

Hi Gary, you videos are concise, clear and very informative on this complex subject matter. Your in depth knowledge and presentation style are commendable indeed! I would like you insight on the the new Sunsaver Plus Solar subscription as i am interested as such. Will you do a video on this potentially growing area in the market please? I look forward to your comments

The problem with privacy policies is that they are policies and can be changed without notice at anytime. Hell, they could even change them back too. They are worthless to the end user. It wouldn’t be worth reading that garbage.

Thanks your video covers many questions but also misses a few. I feel there are risks with business going bankrupt or being taken over by other companies with different ideas. There is a risk that a business may change operating model to one of paid subscription for instance and blackmailing customers into paid services. There are many instances of this change of policy across the technology field. I also think there is a risk to a country that starts to have a percentage of solar home generation – this is the forcing a black restart by shutting down home systems across a country. This is too complex to detail here but it could happen.

Great video. It does seem to heavily centre around trust, but the features do seem to be worth the small risk at present. I will say that for my own solar system the physical hardware was connected to a separate vlan on the network so East-West communications are blocked and only the required WAN destinations are permitted. To be fair that should apply to all IoT devices people install these days. It’s sad, but I would bet that the majority of home networks lack the sophistication to have any real security at all! These devices are connecting to your network, do you know what they are capable of doing… I don’t… I do know it is trivial to gain full access to your network if they wanted to.

Hello from rural down under here am off grid remote rural, no smart meters here and I power a house workshop and various sheds, solar and wind.

I’ve got a Solis system and Dyness batteries. As soon as I was happy it was working well, the Wi-Fi dongle was unplugged. It now carries on running quite happily by itself. There might be updates, but if it’s happy why take the risk updating? There’s no guarantee the update would be better for me.

Hi Gary Since I had new smart meters installed at the end of January I was getting daily readings from my provider's website. BUT on 26 February this stopped. I am away from home and want to collect daily readings over a few weeks to establish a reasonable daily average to sort out a long-standing dispute over my bill since 2019 when my old meter stopped working. I have contacted the provider with no response so far. Is it likely my meters have stopped working, or that the link to the cloud has failed or that the provider has blocked my access - more sinister. Have you come across this problem before? Mike

Interesting video and veiw point and by and large I agree with your sentiment. However there are times when even reputable companies screw up even those that have or had ISO 27001 off the top of my head I can think of a company outside of Solar arena like VW and deisel gate that was a 'firmware overide' when a testing scenario was detected. Whats to stop a company fudging the figures to prove their batteries for example are better than others if you just come to rely on 'cloud based evidence' supplied by that company? Sorry I've been quite cynical since getting burned a couple of times with cloud based evidence. Moreover, over the air updates or any updates to firmware/ software that are needed I tend to lag behind and only allow them once other ginea pigs have shown there are no downsides or rather dangerous bugs