Which systems do a good job of providing notifications and logs of grid outages?

[jlsoaz]

Hi - For about 6 years I have a 12 kWh battery bank in my garage and an outback inverter and some solar panels, and I am grid tied. 

I like the system, but the software at opticsre.com does not provide me with:

- immediate unmistakable easy-to-set-up notification of grid outages.  Ideally this would be text, plus email, plus possibly a visual or audio indicator inside the house.
- long-term readily-accessed easy to set up permanent logs (such as to email) which will allow me to know when I have grid outages.

Can anyone here lay out if they have a competing system and if that system comes equipped to do a good job on these two points? 

Background:
- The software at opticsre.com offers a lot of different options and features and I like it at first, but it doesn't readily/easily give me the top priority items above.  I speak with Outback every year or two about this.  They try to walk me through what it can do, and a year or two ago they walked me through setting up to receive logs.  However, this was set up so that I receive an email and if I don't download the log from a website within a day or two, the file is deleted on their end.  So ridiculous.

- I spoke today to my microwave dish internet provider about a local outage they had yesterday, and they said it was attributable to a power outage on the mountaintop nearby.  I asked if they had power backup and they said yes they did, and it had functioned well, except that they were not notified that it had to kick in, and so the grid outage eventually resulted in an outage for them and their customers.  So, whether their system actually does make notification easy and they just didn't get it set up right, or whether it doesn't, the important point to me is that this is not just me - apparently other owners of grid-tied power backup systems (including who are more sophisticated and have more resources than I do) also have difficulty getting this one key feature up and running.

[dnix71]

Upstate New York "National Grid" sends messages to people who register. This provider in South Carolina does the same
https://www.sceg.com/outages-emergencies/power-outages/text-message-reporting .
Where I live FPL will send you an email any time they verify an outage, otherwise the text messages or phone calls are made during hours you would be expected to be awake to receive them.
https://www.fpl.com/support/notification-alerts.html

All you need is a cell phone that is setup to notify you when you get an email from a particular contact.

[SparWeb]

I just checked, and my service provider can send SMS text notifications of an outage to me, too.
These notices are confined to the area of my house, so I (hope) would not be notified of a town on the other side of the province were interrupted.
The notice only goes out when the repair crew determines the extent of the outage.  As they investigate, it probably gets updated.

There are regulations in the way.  For the transfer to be automatic, there has to be properly approved equipment on-line at all times.  And Automatic Transfer Relays are expensive.  To save cost, many opt for a manual transfer, hoping that they will notice.
There are some old varieties of un-approved equipment that can carry out the transfer automatically but they don't comply with anti-islanding requirements, which would be a safety problem if they were on line without approval.

At times, I've left a datalogger running at my house monitoring the grid voltage.  Obviously a datalog such as that will record an outage.  If I also had a system to transfer, then even the datalogger wouldn't notice, unless it had some discrete input recording the state of activity of my own system at the same time.

[jlsoaz]

To be honest, I hadn't even thought of this question of seeing if the grid power provider could send me a heads-up when they've failed me, but it's an interesting sort of supplemental point.  I am looking at their site (UESAZ, related to the provider for the Tucson, AZ, USA area) and they do have a map of outages in my county, but I don't know about text notification.  I say "supplemental" because I still very much want the full information directly from my own inverter.

I'm flummoxed by the the inverter-makers.  How hard can it really be just to let me know when the expensive equipment they have sold me detects an outage, no matter how small or large?

[SparWeb]

Depending on the age of the equipment, the ability to log data may be limited.
My SW4024 from the 1990's can log a few values, such as the last high and low voltage on each line but not the time of the event.
OTOH, about 10 years ago I sorted through the log files from a Sunny Boy and it basically stored a megabyte every day.  Almost every parameter is logged, every few seconds.
The Sunny Boy would overwrite the logged data with new readings as the memory filled.  How else is it supposed to store more info? 
This is very common procedure and I would not get frustrated with Outback for choosing to do this.  Most datalogging equipment behaves like this.  Aircraft black-boxes, for example.
Can you combine this notification from your power provider with the ability to download a log into a way to capture the data you need, to access it when you know you need it?

[makenzie71]

I have a lightbulb in the kitchen that does a very rudimentary, but superbly accurate job of telling me when there's an outage.  When we have power it turns on, and we the power goes out it turns off.  The log can really only be read in real time and it's a simple 0/1 readout, but it is very accurate.

[jlsoaz]

Depending on the age of the equipment, the ability to log data may be limited.
My SW4024 from the 1990's can log a few values, such as the last high and low voltage on each line but not the time of the event.
OTOH, about 10 years ago I sorted through the log files from a Sunny Boy and it basically stored a megabyte every day.  Almost every parameter is logged, every few seconds.
The Sunny Boy would overwrite the logged data with new readings as the memory filled.  How else is it supposed to store more info? 
This is very common procedure and I would not get frustrated with Outback for choosing to do this.  Most datalogging equipment behaves like this.  Aircraft black-boxes, for example.

The Outback equipment is about 6 years old at most and is relatively sophisticated.  It already sends the data offsite to some sort of server somewhere (theirs, not mine).  They send me an email and let me know I have 12 hours to download this log.  Then they delete it.  Unless I'm missing something, I very much do blame them.  Not to be too testy about this, but I just noticed today a 2-day-old email where I could have downloaded another log.  I intend to send them a new comment at some point in the next few days.

I understand about limited onsite memory, but this is not onsite.  It reminds me of 5-10 years ago when I walked into my branch of Wells Fargo, conducted some business, and on the way out I told them sarcastically maybe Warren Buffett was hard up for money, and if he was, I could maybe lend him some.  After all, they were claiming that they didn't have the computer power to save customer bank records going back more than some minimum amount (12 or 18 or 24 months?  I don't remember) so that I could conveniently do my taxes every year without running up against some artificial time deadline.  A year or two later, Wells Fargo finally started to offer these records more easily and going further back to customers.  Nothing to do with my comment I'm sure, but my point is that Wells Fargo's excuse-making was utter bs.  I suspect as well with Outback.  Probably they just are so geeked out they don't realize they are being anti-customer.

Can you combine this notification from your power provider with the ability to download a log into a way to capture the data you need, to access it when you know you need it?

I'm not sure quite what this means, but if you mean something along the lines of writing a script to go fetch something, then it's the exact opposite of what they should be providing for me.  They should be providing for me:

- clear notification of all outages, large or small, as they happen.
- a log of all outages, larger or small.

Considering the amount of money I paid for their system, and the ease with which they could probably do these things, and the dozens of features they do offer that I find worthless, both of these fall under the heading that they should not kid themselves that they are doing me any favors.

[SparWeb]

I didn't realize how important this is to you at first.

My suggestion was clumsily written.  Yes, the process can be automated if you want.  It can also be the manual method of running to your computer as soon as you see the e-mail from your power provider.

I checked on the OpticsRE.com website.  "Simple insight into complex data via historical graphs"
That claim isn't consistent with the experience you're having.

I tried the demo of the app.
I selected to view the system named "AADL FP1 B"
That system is grid-connected and has PV connected to VFX and FM80 units.
It's charging and selling to grid now (OK).
Switching to the Event viewer, I can see that the inverter's state toggled this morning at 7:12 to enable grid sell.
The history goes back a long way, and jumping randomly to February 2020, I can see other transitions in the inverter's state logged by date, time and a description of the condition.
Exporting this data would allow you to observe cases where the inverter disables the grid-tie when the other state conditions (eg, Charge Parameters Met) indicate that it should be enabled.

[jlsoaz]

I didn't realize how important this is to you at first.

My suggestion was clumsily written.  Yes, the process can be automated if you want.  It can also be the manual method of running to your computer as soon as you see the e-mail from your power provider.

I checked on the OpticsRE.com website.  "Simple insight into complex data via historical graphs"
That claim isn't consistent with the experience you're having.

You can say that again.

The thing is, I ignore this issue for months at a time.  I recognized within a few months of getting the software enabled (which in itself took me quite a long time) that
a) I was going to have problems with getting the signal to their server reliably (solved that a year or two ago with finally getting a computer networking service come by and install ethernet through the concrete)
b) the company just had little clue that:
i this is an important feature
ii they should provide it without being asked, at a dead-simple level, without any further discussion.  It should be a top priority if they really care about customer satisfaction.

I don't have training or a degree in it, but I think it's legit to talk about corporate anthropology and psychology, and I smelled the stench of "we are not going to get this any time soon", so I left it alone mostly for a long time.

However, I realized the other day that a larger computer-sophisticated entity had told me a story of them also having this issue, so it was good to verify that it's not just me.  I do suspect that the industry has been evolving and that there might be modern installers of inverters and batteries and solar and what-not who may provide what I'm seeking without making a big deal out of it or causing the customer to have to learn a lot.

I tried the demo of the app.
I selected to view the system named "AADL FP1 B"
That system is grid-connected and has PV connected to VFX and FM80 units.
It's charging and selling to grid now (OK).
Switching to the Event viewer, I can see that the inverter's state toggled this morning at 7:12 to enable grid sell.
The history goes back a long way, and jumping randomly to February 2020, I can see other transitions in the inverter's state logged by date, time and a description of the condition.
Exporting this data would allow you to observe cases where the inverter disables the grid-tie when the other state conditions (eg, Charge Parameters Met) indicate that it should be enabled.