My solar died for 6 months, so I built a watchdog
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Hi HN, Shawn here. My rooftop system lost about half a year of production and nobody told me. Not the installer, not the monitoring app, not the utility. I found out from an electric bill that made no sense, then spent weeks digging through the monitoring portal by hand.SunRanker is what I wished existed that day. Connect a system once (Enphase OAuth, or a SolarEdge site ID plus API key) and it reads production daily, shows it in plain language, and emails you when something actually changes. Three alerts only. The connection broke, the monitoring went quiet, or output has been well below your own typical for days. Plus a short monthly review. No daily drip.It's free, and my own system is on the homepage with its bad months showing. The gray months are my monitoring going quiet.Would love feedback on the alert thresholds (drop detection is five days under half of a 28 day baseline) and which brand to support next. Tesla makes this hard for third parties.Stack, for the curious. Laravel, Livewire, MySQL, and one scheduled job doing the nightly checks.
HN · launched Aug 10, 2026 · 15 upvotes (top 30%) · 0 views
Niche: energy and utility management software · 61 launches, 7 in the last 7 days ▼ -30% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Energy & climate
- Observability & eval
- Prosumer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 61 launches in energy and utility management software →
Could you build this?
Yes It is a standard web application connecting to solar inverter APIs (like Enphase or SolarEdge) on a schedule to check production metrics and send email alerts.
Discussion
12 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Midnight Solar (hardware and software with remote monitoring), Enphase app (1st party monitoring with alerts), Utility providers (grid electricity management)
Concerns raised: Unclear what advantages it offers over existing 1st party apps like Enphase, Most people don't check solar stats daily anyway, Requires additional auth/API key setup vs configuring existing apps, Unclear target market (individuals vs commercial properties), Most people stay grid-connected so won't notice production issues immediately
Feature requests: Better notification system (alerts, emails, texts for production issues), Clarify what makes this better than 1st party monitoring solutions
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 107 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #45 of 108 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 282 days after the earliest competitor.
- Helio · ph · 2026-10-26 · 77 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Nightwatch · hn · 2026-10-04 · 87 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- VoltSolar · ph · 2026-11-05 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Spikelog · hn · 2025-11-27 · 36 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Nightwatch, The open-source, read-only AI SRE · hn · 2026-06-07 · 33 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Power Watch · ph · 2026-09-22 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Home Inventory · ph · 2026-11-01 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Damn Is It Down · ph · 2026-11-06 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.38
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