SolisCloud 17+

The app wasn’t anywhere near perfect before the May 2023 update but it has now got even worse. The daily Consumption figure is now fixed at 1kWh (our usual is 8kWh), what’s worse is it has applied this retrospectively to all data before the update - useless! The Generation data has lost the breakdown of how much went to battery and how much was used in the house, even more useless. Finally, from a user-interface point of view, it used to show you a percentage of peak performance of your relay - this is now stuck at 0.01% even in glorious sunshine. It also used to show you the rough amount of battery charge and solar performance of your relay on the home page via a circle round each category (Total Yield, Total Charge, Today to Grid, Today Consumption). This was also lost on the latest update and I cannot fathom why. I hope the big fixes were worth it because I feel we’ve taken a step to 5yrs ago with everything else. The app has gone from rough but useable to unsteady and unreliable. Not a great improvement.

…with a few issues. The app is really good for checking generation status and looking at historic data. It also allows me to set charging schedules for my battery although the route to this is complex and took me a long time to learn how to do it. I only discovered I could charge my battery after a comment I saw on Twitter.

A major issue is the app is utterly useless at working out earnings from the excess energy exported to the grid. It should be easy. I currently get 15p for each kWh exported. The problem is the app thinks I get paid 15p for every kWh generated. Feed in tariffs ended in the UK years ago, I only get paid for what I export.

I’m glad I chose a Solis inverter, it has worked really well, the desktop app is much better than the mobile app (please can we have an app for tablets, rather than just one for smartphones!) There is a huge amount of data collected and Solis have been very helpful when there have been issues. You have to learn how to ‘raise a ticket’ to get the help, but that is probably because Solis are more geared to a business use rather than domestic.

For historical data this app is very useful, but the real-time display is inaccurate, as it only updates every 5-6 minutes (that’s minutes, not seconds!). You could have boiled the kettle when it updated and will continue to show you importing several kW for the next 5 minutes. It’s also inaccurate, as it seems to estimate the values, or more likely uses AI to predict what your data should be. It appears to update the app from data collected on their remote server, rather than data collected from the inverter. I have a Zappi EV charger, and get more accurate display from the MyEnergi app, which updates every few seconds. There are regular Solis app updates, and I keep hoping that the real-time display will be improved to reflect an app in the 21st century, but unfortunately Solis appear to be more interested in harvesting your data, rather than providing a true real-time display on the app.