A case study
Two years ago, I had solar PV installed on my house: 15 panels across three roof aspects. Orientation and shading led the installer to suggest optimisers: boxes that sit under each panel and balance performance when illumination is uneven.
At first, it was great. The system was a beast, generating 3x or 4x more on sunny days than we needed, and sending excess clean power back to the grid. Yes, it was expensive to install, but bills were negative. I was happy.
But over time, doubts crept in. There were no obvious faults, no errors. But performance felt… off. Underwhelming. Like most domestic setups, we had only basic monitoring: a dashboard with daily totals. Not enough to spot a silent failure.
After 20 years building software, debugging comes naturally. I trawled forums and interrogated ChatGPT. I pulled raw voltage data from the inverters, wrote custom code to aggregate it, and plotted multi-year voltage trends.
Finally, a pattern: repeated drops in daily maximum string voltage, every few months. Entire panels were dropping out of the system. Failure of PV panels is rare, so suspicion fell on the optimisers. It turned out that at least 5 optimisers had failed catastrophically, their plastic casings cracked and warped, clear signs of thermal stress. Most likely a manufacturing fault, a bad batch.
At last, evidence to send to the installer. They were shocked, and to their credit they've been very supportive. Scaffolding went up, and all 15 optimisers were replaced. Everything is running smoothly again.
And so, the idea for Voltabot was born. Why should this level of deep monitoring and insight only be available to geeks, the switched-on homeowners willing and able to dig into the data? For solar to reach mass adoption, someone needs to be keeping a close eye on the numbers. A failing system not only wastes money, but also doesn't fulfill its potential for reducing emissions.
Voltabot integrates with your inverter to pull raw data, and uses AI to watch it for you. When things are good, light-touch reporting keeps you engaged without having to stare at apps all day. And because our AI watches and understands long-term patterns, it can spot issues that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Register your interest
We're not quite ready to launch, but we'd love to keep you updated with our progress.
