Fortress Power Owner

To level-set: I retired as Fellow at Cisco Systems, having built mission-critical networking code and systems for decades. The Fortress gateway, cloud server, and iOS app manage to stop communicating way too frequently. The last app release adds the ability to manage the device locally via Bluetooth, which is a godsend. The battery scheduler is virtually useless. Changes to key parameters (min charge state, max sell-to-grid rate, etc.) take effect immediately. If you want to run your house on the battery from 6 to 9am (to avoid Duke’s prime / critical prime rate winter window) set your alarm clock for 5:55am, manually adjust a couple of sliders, and hit save. That is IF the device, cloud server and app are willing to play nicely. Multiple timeouts are to be expected. If you’re on site, Bluetooth is your friend. If not, reset everything in sight and hope for the best.

We’ve had Fortress equipment for our hybrid solar with battery backup system for about two months now and although the actual system works well, this app is terrible. Displays data in a strange and what they must think of as a “nuanced” way but in reality it is hard to understand and lately, doesn’t show real time data at all. It’s been down for about three weeks now with no update from the company or explanation; really a pretty poor showing. I would recommend the equipment but not this this app, it’s terrible!

Now that our new system is up and running, I unreservably recommend the Fortress hardware (inverter/smart energy panel). However, I find this app to be lacking. I’d expected it would display energy usage and production data in most any way I’d like to slice it. By day, month, whatever. The latest app update - while most welcome - is limited to displaying data on any given day - but not by other periods (weeks/months/electric bill billing period). The goal should be to view the data over any date range desired.