The sophisticated electronic solar monitoring station operates 24 hours per day. There isn't a great deal to monitor during the night but it keeps monitoring anyway.
Since the solar farm's inverter does not include the optional telemetry hardware, the monitor reads the meter instead. A red LED flashes once for every watt-hour generated. The monitor counts the flashes. The time between flashes is used to calculate the rate of generation.
The Server Farm provides the brain of our solar monitor. At its heart is a powerful computer, continuously monitoring the meter via a phototransistor which acts as its single eye, held in close proximity to the meter's LED using professional quality gaffer tape. Half a floppy drive cable forms the nervous system, connecting the phototransistor to the computer.
A sophisticated monitoring program polls the sensor, recording the data in our database whilst calculating the rate of energy production and keeping count of the total energy produced by the solar farm.
Analysis is performed by a comprehensive web-based tabulation and graphing software suite, developed in-house by our skilled team of analysts.