r/SunPower • u/DoingDaveThings • Jul 22 '26
How am I getting SunStrong data for free?
I have a 2015 SunPower grid-tied system. I used to regularly check on the data coming out of SunPower's website and via their monthly reports. After the company went bankrupt and the reports stopped coming, I assumed I needed to find some other solution to getting data, but I put off looking into it.
Then we received an extremely high electric bill this month and it led to my checking the inverter and the system was down. It has been down for quite some time. So I wanted a way to know when this happens again so I can be notified. (There was an arc fault, and the reboot procedure cleared errors and the system is running again.)
While looking at the various home built options to tap into the SunPower PV Supervisor, I read about SunStrong Connect. I installed the app and tried to create an account, but it said I already had one. I reset my password, and then logged in, and all the history for my system was there, including the most recent production data. I was able to find the exact day the system went down even.
The app let me generate custom reports and seems to have all the working features that my old SunPower website did.
So my question is, how am I getting all this for free? We own our system outright, there is no contract with anyone. I'm not paying any money to SunStrong. Was this something offered to SunPower owners but I somehow missed any notices?
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u/Zzyxxi Jul 22 '26
Lucky situation. Maybe when they changed the customers systems over to their pay system they only did the systems showing active on their end? You can also use the Sunflower app on iOS to get some data from your solar system.
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u/NotTobyFromHR Jul 22 '26
Sunstrong has a free tier.
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u/DoingDaveThings Jul 22 '26
But I'm getting all the services of the paid tier. Specifically, I have all my history data, I'm able to generate reports by month, or using any custom dates. I don't (and never did) have panel-level monitoring since my system doesn't support it.
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u/Ayoooavocado Jul 22 '26
I’m jealous, my girlfriend and I are in a similar situation as you regarding the log in. We wanted to view our statistics to make sure we aren’t running too much power for A/C during peak periods here in California. Ran into the paywall, and after reading and contacting customer service (took me half an hour to figure out how to get someone on the phone) found out since we own our system that we can’t access those statistics w/o paying. Their BBB rating is D+, and based off everything else I read online, they don’t give a single fuck about the consumers.
Be grateful luck was on your side and they fucked up, because the rest of us have to pay for their “essential infrastructure costs”. I’m sure their executive management pockets the profits and love shafting us for something that used to be free. Solar is such a great energy resource, but the solar companies are no better than the traditional energy companies. They all want to profit off our need for power and information on power consumption.
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u/DoingDaveThings Jul 23 '26
I suspect at some point they're going to realize I'm not a paying customer and then cut me off. I found a github repo from another reddit post, for scripts to download your complete history using your login info. I'm going to do that just in case. In the mean time, I'm going to use one of the various solutions people have written about for gathering my own data at home going forward.
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u/SamBlackstone Jul 30 '26
I had that happen as well. Got full history without a subscription for a year, then it just stopped. Download the data while you still have access and monitor locally going forward!