About solarprod (USA)

Know how much power you can use today

Burn too little and you export at a fraction of retail. Burn too much and you are importing through the 4–9 pm peak. The battery is only a buffer if you know how deep you can dip into it. solarprod tells you, before you commit:

• Whether today covers the EV charge, the AC or the big appliance.
• How today’s choices leave the battery for tomorrow morning.
• What each option is worth in dollars: peak exports, no-export windows, an outage reserve you keep in hand.

It uses NOAA and GFS-class forecasts for your specific address, so the answer matches what your system will do today rather than a regional average. A 10 kW system in Phoenix sees roughly twice the annual yield of the same system in Seattle; a “US average” is nobody’s answer.

Get the savings of a VPP without giving up control

A virtual power plant pays you to let someone else run your battery. The rates are good. The catch is that they decide when it charges and when it empties, and you find out afterwards. solarprod gives you the first half without the second:

• We work out the week ahead for you: when to charge, when to hold, when to sell into the peak. You do not have to think about it each day.
• The plan is built from your roof: the orientation and tilt of your panels, and the local forecast for your address. Most VPPs run a whole fleet of batteries against a market signal, and never look at whether your panels will be under cloud at 3pm.
• One press writes that schedule to your own inverter, as ordinary timers. Nothing of ours sits between you and your battery.
• Change, edit or delete any of it whenever you like. Timers you set by hand stay exactly where you put them; ones that came from your plan are labelled, so you can see which the next plan update will replace.
• No contract and no aggregator. Nobody else gets to decide your battery is needed at 6pm.

When the weather shifts, refresh the schedule with one press. Available today for Tesla, Deye and GoodWe inverters. With Sungrow and Victron inverters we can read your solar and battery data but can’t set timers yet. We’ll add more inverters as our users ask for them.

Get a forecast that allows for hot panels

The same panels behave very differently in Phoenix and Seattle, even for the same sun hours, because panel temperature changes everything. A Phoenix roof at 110 °F ambient pushes cells past 70 °C and costs 12–15 % off nameplate. A Seattle install at 50 °F runs cool and delivers close to it. A Vermont winter morning at 20 °F actually beats it.

Most tools assume the 77 °F lab reference and ignore the rest, which overstates Arizona summer and understates Northeast winter. We model it from real ambient temperature, hour by hour. You can switch it off to see the rated answer for comparison; the default is on because it matches what your system actually does.

Model the net-metering rules of your own state

California’s NEM 3.0 collapsed export rates to a fraction of retail while many states still pay near retail, and time-of-use shifting matters enormously in CA and barely at all on a flat rate. The export strategies (Default, Maximise Charge, Charge EV, Charge EV max) let you model whichever rules apply where you are, against your own tariff, and see the dollar outcome.

See whether you could live off the grid

We play a real year of weather over your roof, day by day, carrying the battery over each night. You get:

• The days you would have run out, and how badly. One bad day is what a battery is for. A week of overcast is what catches people out.
• A calendar of the year, so you can see at a glance whether it is a whole season or the odd scattered week. Different problems, different fixes.
• What a generator would cost. When it starts, how long it runs, and roughly the year’s gas. A second calendar shows the thirsty days.
• More panels, bigger battery, or a generator? Answered for your address, not by a rule of thumb.

Cabin, homestead, or a lot where the utility quoted six figures to run a line: this answers it with the weather at your address, not a national average. Montana in January and Arizona in January are not the same question.

Plan an RV trip or a week boondocking before you go

Energy budgets are tight out there and the consequences are real: no AC in a Texas summer is a health problem, not a comfort one. Ahead of time you can:

• See which stops have enough sun for your AC, fridge and inverter, and which need a generator or a hookup night.
• Compare rooftop panels against ground-deployable arrays for shaded sites.
• Decide morning-of whether to dry camp another day or move to a park with hookups, given the next 48 hours.
• Right-size the install before you buy it: battery, panel wattage, generator margin.

Contact

General enquiries, feedback or feature requests: [email protected].

Product help, how-to questions or bug reports: [email protected].