Your solar monitoring stopped working. Here is how to get it back.
When an installer shuts down, its monitoring portal often goes with it — and homeowners lose visibility into a system that may be running perfectly well. Check this before you pay anyone to diagnose a fault.
Losing the app is not the same as losing the system
Many installers put their own branding on a monitoring platform they did not build. The underlying data comes from your inverter manufacturer; the app was a skin on top of it. When the installer's account lapses, the skin disappears and the data keeps flowing to a platform you simply cannot see.
So the first question is not "how do I fix my system" but "is my system actually broken". Two checks answer it.
Check one: your utility bill
Compare recent billed kilowatt hours against the same months last year. If consumption is roughly flat, your array is producing and this is purely a monitoring problem. If it has jumped back toward pre-solar levels, production has genuinely stopped and you can date roughly when from the statements.
The cheapest diagnostic you can run. Billed kilowatt hours against the same months last year. Flat means the array is fine and you have a monitoring problem. A step change dates the failure to within a billing cycle.
Check two: the inverter itself
Walk out to the unit in the middle of a sunny day. A string inverter with a display should show current output in watts. A green status light generally means normal operation. If the unit is reporting production while your app says nothing, the diagnosis is confirmed: the equipment is fine and the reporting link is broken.
Getting reporting back
- Identify the manufacturer. Read the brand and model off the inverter enclosure. Enphase, SolarEdge, SMA, Fronius, and Tesla all run their own monitoring platforms independent of whoever installed the equipment.
- Create an account with them directly. Not with the installer's branded portal — with the manufacturer. You will typically need the system serial number and proof of address or ownership.
- Request a transfer of system ownership. If the defunct installer registered the system under its own account, the manufacturer can usually reassign it. Support teams handle this routinely; installer bankruptcies have made it a common request.
- Check the internet connection. Monitoring reports through your home network. A router replacement, a changed wi-fi password, or a relocated gateway will silently kill reporting. This is the most common cause that has nothing to do with the installer at all.
- If none of that works, get it looked at. A failed communications gateway or current transformer needs hardware replacement, typically a few hundred dollars.
Set up an alert while you are in there. The reason a dead array goes unnoticed for months is that nothing tells you. Most manufacturer platforms can email you when production drops below a threshold or stops entirely. Turning that on takes two minutes and is the single best protection against paying a full utility bill for a system you thought was working.
Why this matters more than it sounds
Without monitoring you have no way to know whether you are getting what you are paying for. A microinverter system can lose several panels' worth of output and look completely normal from the driveway. In the Central Valley, where an array might be offsetting a punishing summer cooling bill, a partial failure that runs for a year is a substantial amount of money quietly going out the door.
Restoring visibility also puts you in a far better position with any contractor. Production history is diagnostic evidence. Being able to show exactly when output dropped, and by how much, shortens the service call and reduces the guesswork you are paying for.