App Profile: MySunPower

Pi3142857

Rating: 5/5

A good app: monitors power production of my rooftop solar panels, showing power generation in real time, and providing historical analyses over the life of the installation. It generally seems pretty reliable, and on the rare occasion it breaks down, the company is responsive in terms of fixing it. As with most apps, there is room for improvement. The greatest, though perhaps the hardest, would be to integrate power consumption in the home, to understand net consumption from the grid, and its daily/seasonal structure. Easier improvements would include the ability to compare a given month over different years (compare Februaries over the life of the installation, for example), and to include lifetime averages to compare to today’s or this month’s production.

Steppenwolf62

Rating: 1/5

INITIAL REVIEW: I was pretty excited about being able to track my usage, but I was quite disappointed. I have no confidence in the accuracy of its reporting. Yesterday, for example, it showed us producing 0.1 kW. (A cloudy, rainy day, so this is no surprise.). It showed home usage of 1.4kW. So, naturally, you would expect the readings to show 1.3kW being pulled from the grid. Instead, the app happily showed us feeding 1.5 kW *into* the grid. So, the app was 2.8kW off on reporting 0.1kW production. (This was so startlingly inaccurate that I even took a photo of it, just to make sure I was remembering this correctly.) Unfortunately, it was not the only time yesterday that the readings were off. UPDATE: I contacted Sunpower, and the app is reporting readings that make much more sense. There is still a problem of the occasional crash, but this is working MUCH better, and I am adding two more stars. Thanks, guys! NEW UPDATE, October 2021 Well… the numbers are consistent now. No strange math. However, the production and consumption numbers are still way, way, off. I downloaded Smartmeter to see what my meter readings were, and compared them with what MySunPower was telling me, and they have never matched, ever. According to Smartmeter(the local utility’s meter-reading app), for the last few months I have a 310 KwH surplus. According to MySunPower, I have a 2,500 KwH surplus. This is not a trivial difference!

Gary Linford

Rating: 2/5

The fundamental issue I have with this app is the fact that it would often fail when it was needed the most. Let me expand. In the San Jose area we had numerous big storms and some of which resulted in electrical outages (PGE) and some were hours long. We would monitor the weather and wind forecasts and when we thought there was a good chance of an outage we would attempt to change the battery settings from “self supply” to “reserve” and the app would fail. Note, we still had power and still had internet service at those times but for some strange reason the app wasn’t working so we couldn’t make that change. And worse yet, during several of those storms (and we had many storms this season) I would find the app wasn’t working or updating our data. I would have to go outside to visually look at our batteries charging status to know if the system was running correctly. And worst yet on a few occasions the status lights on the battery didn’t give any information! I tried calling your service line to complain and there was no immediate response nor was there any answer to why the app or batteries status wasn’t working. When did get a response it was weeks or a month later and who cares! Why can’t I have a physical switch at the batter to change the operating mode?