Sungrow monitoring with PVBiz

Sungrow connects through the iSolarCloud OpenAPI, which means five values rather than a simple login: the region of your account (International, Europe, Australia or China), an App Key, a Secret Key, and your iSolarCloud user email or username and password. PVBiz stores all five encrypted. The app’s connect screen shows where to find the key and secret. Sungrow is available on the PVBiz Installer Platform today, which is where installers and O&M teams monitor mixed-brand fleets. Homeowner subscriptions do not currently include it.

What PVBiz reads

PVBiz reads from the inverter: DC and AC power, today’s and total yield, frequency, air temperature, and per-phase voltage and current. For strings it reads MPPT voltage and current, with power calculated as voltage times current. Where a grid meter is installed, PVBiz overlays grid power, frequency, import and export. Readings poll about every five minutes. Totals are refreshed hourly.

What Sungrow does not give PVBiz

Be clear before you connect: there is no load or battery data for Sungrow. Load power is not requested and every battery field is empty, so you will not see consumption, battery state of charge or battery alerts. Import, export and load totals appear only where a meter provides them, and otherwise stay blank rather than being shown as zero. Sungrow also gives no collection timestamp with the readings.

History

Totals backfill from each plant’s install date, with a floor of 2015. Ordinary runs pull the last 30 days of daily values, and the historical pull excludes the current day.

Alerts

PVBiz’s own rules give inverter offline, plant offline and communication failure, with status taken from the device’s fault status, plus thresholds on the solar, grid and temperature metrics above. Sungrow’s own alarm list is not imported. PVBiz is read-only on Sungrow; Sunsynk is the only brand where it can change settings.