TL;DR:

  • Your inverter manufacturer’s app is usually the first port of call, but third-party platforms like PVOutput and Solarman offer better historical data and community features
  • Monitoring apps let you catch underperforming panels early, optimise self-consumption, and verify your Smart Export Guarantee payments are accurate
  • For battery owners, integration between the inverter app, battery app, and your energy tariff is increasingly important

Once your solar panels are up and generating, the question becomes: how well are they actually performing? Most people glance at the inverter display occasionally or check if their electricity bill has dropped, but proper monitoring does a lot more than that. It catches problems early, tells you whether your Smart Export Guarantee payments look right, and helps you understand when to run high-demand appliances to maximise self-consumption.

Here’s a tour of the main options for UK solar owners.

Your Inverter Manufacturer’s App: Start Here

The easiest starting point is whatever app came with your inverter. The major manufacturers all have decent mobile apps that show real-time generation, daily and historical totals, and basic alerts.

SolarEdge has perhaps the best reputation here. The SolarEdge monitoring app gives per-panel production data if you have their optimisers fitted, which is genuinely useful — you can see at a glance if one panel in your array is underperforming due to shading, soiling, or a fault. The web portal is more feature-rich than the mobile app and shows weather-adjusted expected generation vs actual.

SMA’s SunnyPortal and the associated SMA Home app are solid but have historically had a slightly clunkier interface. Huawei FusionSolar is increasingly common in new UK installs and has a clean app with good historical data and battery integration if you have a Huawei battery system.

GivEnergy, popular in the UK market particularly for battery installs, has the GivEnergy app that covers both solar and battery monitoring with reasonable granularity. Solis (formerly Ginlong) uses the SolisCloud app, which is functional if not the most polished option.

The limitation of manufacturer apps is vendor lock-in. If you ever change inverter or add a product from a different brand, you end up juggling multiple apps with no unified view.

PVOutput: Community Data and Comparison

PVOutput (pvoutput.org) is a free community platform where solar owners upload their generation data and can compare performance against nearby systems. It’s been running since 2010 and has a huge UK user base, making it one of the best tools for answering the question “is my system performing as well as it should?”

You register your system — entering your postcode, panel details, inverter model, and array orientation — and either manually log generation data or set up automatic uploads via a compatible device (a Solar Assistant device, a Raspberry Pi with SolarEdge API access, or a dedicated data logger). Once you’re connected to automatic logging, PVOutput shows your daily, weekly, and monthly generation, efficiency per panel, CO2 offset, and estimated earnings.

The comparison features are where PVOutput earns its place. You can see how similar systems in your area performed on any given day, which is enormously useful for fault-finding. If your neighbours’ systems show strong generation on a sunny Tuesday but yours shows poor output, that’s a signal worth investigating. The community forums are also genuinely helpful — UK-specific advice on feed-in tariff questions, Smart Export Guarantee rate disputes, and installation quality issues.

PVOutput does have a paid tier (£15 per year) that unlocks more detailed data, longer history, and API access, but the free tier is sufficient for most home users.

If your system uses an inverter from a Chinese manufacturer — Deye, Sofar Solar, Growatt, or similar — there’s a good chance it connects to the Solarman platform. Solarman is increasingly popular in the UK because these inverters often offer strong value for money and the Solarman app is included as the monitoring solution.

The app shows real-time and historical generation, consumption if you have a consumption meter fitted, and battery charge/discharge data if applicable. The interface is clean and the data is generally reliable. One practical consideration: Solarman’s servers are in China, which raises data privacy questions that some owners consider relevant under UK GDPR, though for generation monitoring rather than personal communications this is largely a matter of individual preference.

Third-party integrations exist for pulling Solarman data into Home Assistant, allowing you to combine it with other home energy data — electricity tariff pricing, EV charging state, heating system data — in a single dashboard.

Home Assistant: The Power User Option

For those comfortable with a bit of DIY setup, Home Assistant has become the hub of choice for serious solar monitoring in the UK. The SolarEdge, Solarman, GivEnergy, and most other inverter brands have Home Assistant integrations, often community-built but well-maintained.

With Home Assistant, you can build custom dashboards showing your real-time solar generation, current grid import/export, battery state of charge, and household consumption all in one view. The automation possibilities are compelling too — automatically starting your dishwasher when solar generation exceeds a threshold, or sending you an alert if daily generation is more than 20% below the seasonal average for your location.

The setup investment is non-trivial, but the payoff is a genuinely unified view of your home energy system that no manufacturer app can match.

Checking Your Smart Export Guarantee Payments

One practical reason to monitor carefully is verifying your SEG payments are accurate. Most SEG tariffs pay per unit exported, and your supplier should be reading your export meter. If you have a smart meter, export is logged automatically. If not, you may be on deemed export — a fixed percentage of generation — which can significantly understate your actual export if you self-consume a lot.

Cross-referencing your inverter or monitoring app data with your SEG statements is the only way to catch discrepancies. If your monitoring shows you exported 1,200 kWh in a quarter but your SEG payment reflects 400 kWh, it’s worth querying with your supplier. The Ofgem SEG guidance requires licensees to offer metered export where technically feasible, so pushing for a smart meter if you don’t have one is worthwhile.

What to Monitor For

Beyond generation totals, good monitoring should alert you to a few specific things: sustained underperformance against expected generation for the season, a single panel or string showing significantly lower output than the others, unexpected generation at night or in very low light (which can indicate inverter faults), and complete outages during daylight hours.

Most inverter apps send push notifications for faults. Setting up alerts for generation below a daily threshold — say, under 2 kWh on a clear August day for a typical 4kW system — gives you an early warning of problems before they become expensive.

The monitoring landscape has improved considerably in the past two years. Whatever inverter you have, there’s almost certainly a way to get better visibility into your system’s performance than checking the display on the garage wall once a month.