Review for SMA America, LLC

02/22/2017
Anonymous Oviedo, FL

Review added by scottmclarke

I have some good things to say about the inverter and one (minor) bad thing.<br /><br />First, they generally work fine, as far as producing electricity and performing their basic functions. So far, they have been 100% reliable and working great. No problems at all with respect to the main function of the inverters. <br /><br />The inverters (we have 2) were easy to connect to my home network and they receive automatic updates over the internet and the Sunny Portal web interface gives me some insights into how they are performing (more on this later). <br /><br />The Sunny Portal web interface generally works "ok" but I have had some days where, according to the web interface, either my system reported no solar generation at all or that it generated orders of magnitude more electricity than is physically possible (e.g. 40 Megawatt hours in one day!). Eventually, I lost confidence in the Sunny Portal software, even though everything seemed to be working just fine. I can confirm, by looking at the Duke Energy electric meter that the system was working fine, but for whatever reason, the web portal reported otherwise. Some might consider this a minor inconvenience. I should also note that the last anomaly I witnessed in the Sunny Web portal was over 2 months ago, and since then it's been working just fine (hence the 5 star review, even with this issue, which perhaps has since been resolved).<br /><br />However, I am a bit of a tech geek (I am a software architect by trade) and I was able to find the technical documentation for the inverters and with the help of Jan at Solar-Ray and John, engineer at SMA, I was able to get the necessary passwords and write my own software application to monitor the inverters. I have since been using that instead of the Sunny Portal that SMA provides.