If your solar monitoring app is not alerting you, that is the design, not a fault: if your solar system went quiet tomorrow, the message would probably not reach you. SolarEdge keeps alert rules in the installer’s account and only emails the owner if the installer has ticked a per-site permission; Enphase needs 10% of your microinverters silent for five consecutive days before a not-reporting condition is pushed to a phone; and the Growatt homeowner app markets no alerting at all (the checkboxes live in a web portal, tied to whichever email address was typed in at commissioning). None of the three will tell you on its own that you are simply producing less than you should: SolarEdge has no such alert at all, and Enphase’s only fires against a threshold the installer has to set. If what you want is to be told when your solar inverter stops, rather than to find out weeks later, here is what to check, per brand, in about ten minutes.
The alerting was built for installers, and the documentation says so
SolarEdge’s application note on alerts states its purpose plainly: “the alerts system enables installers to resolve issues across their PV fleet.” Enphase describes per-panel alerting as “one of the benefits of the Enphase Installer Portal.” Growatt’s automatic anomaly detection is a feature of its installer app, not of the homeowner one.
That is a defensible design. A company monitoring hundreds of sites needs batched, filtered, fleet-level alerts. But it means the homeowner’s app is, in practice, a read-only window that you have to open to learn anything, and it explains why owners keep finding out by accident. One UK owner found out from an email reporting that the system had generated nothing for 24 hours, so a full day of production was already gone before the message existed:
We had solar panels installed in 2015 and everything was fine until February 2018. Then we received an email saying that our system had generated no electricity in the last 24 hours.
SolarEdge monitoring email alerts: three gates, and the one you cannot reach
Three separate gates sit between a fault at your house and an email in your inbox. All three are controlled by whoever holds the installer account.
1. The rules are not yours. Alert rules live in Alert Profiles, and only users with the account manager or account admin role can create, edit or enable them. As a system owner you cannot.
2. Your email address must be exposed. An e-mail reaches you only if you have permission to receive alerts, and the installer sets it: Admin → Site Access → [your name] → “Expose to alerts notifications”. If nobody ever ticked it, no rule can reach you, however well configured it is.
3. Then the rule itself must include owners. Per rule, the documentation says “System owners receive notifications of alerts. This box is checked by default for System owners”, but only in the profile the installer assigned to your site, and only for the rules the installer switched on.
Two thresholds are worth memorising, because they set the floor on how fast you can possibly hear anything:
| Condition | Documented wording | Threshold |
|---|---|---|
| Inverter silent | “No communication with the Inverter” | “An alert is only triggered if there is no communication for at least 3 hours.” |
| Whole site silent | “No communication with the site — None of the inverters or devices on-site are communicating” | also at least 3 hours |
| Meter silent | — | “only if there is no communication for at least a full day.” |
Delivery is a digest by default: the setting reads “Receive daily notifications of new alerts by email”, and the document refers to “the daily alert’s notification email”. Immediate delivery is a separate opt-in checkbox, “Immediately notify users”. So even in the best case, the documented path from silence to inbox is three hours of no communication plus a daily roll-up, unless someone has ticked immediate delivery.
What you cannot check yourself is either of the things that decide the outcome: which alert rules are enabled in the profile assigned to your site, and whether “Expose to alerts notifications” is ticked against your name. Both live on the installer side, so both have to be put to the account holder, in writing: which alert rules are enabled on my site, and is “Expose to alerts notifications” ticked against my email address?
One more SolarEdge detail: S_OK means the inverter is connected to the monitoring platform, and on HD-Wave units that is the blue LED. Green on with blue off is an inverter that is producing and telling nobody. If your app has stopped updating, start with the inverter offline triage instead. If you have a code on the screen, the list is in the SolarEdge error-code guide. More on the platform itself on our SolarEdge monitoring page.
Enphase Envoy not reporting: what actually reaches your phone
Enphase publishes its thresholds, and they are unambiguous:
- Warning: at least one microinverter not reporting for 12 hours during daylight. This is an in-app status change. No push.
- Error, and only then a notification: at least 10% of microinverters not reporting for five consecutive days. At that point “homeowners and installers will be notified via text, email, or push notification, depending on their selected preferences.”
Do the arithmetic on your own roof. On an 11-panel system, one silent microinverter is 9%, which is under the bar, so it never escalates past a Warning, no matter how long it lasts. A 20-panel system needs two dead units; 30 panels needs three. And for a microinverter-not-reporting condition, the fastest possible notification is five days after the failure starts.
Enphase explains the reasoning itself, and says plainly who the alerting is for:
“Alert emails… are batched so they can be addressed with a single service call… A single panel that is not producing has minimal impact on the production of the array in total. By batching service calls, impacts to installer workday schedules are minimized.”
That is a reasonable engineering choice, and it protects the installer’s working day rather than your kWh.
Where to look, as the owner. The notification settings sit at Menu → Account → My Notifications in the Enphase App. The default is “Receive only recommended notifications”; the channels offered are Email, Text and Push, and texts need a registered mobile number. Health states in the app are Normal, Warning and Error; “System offline” is not one of them.
Two naming traps while you audit. Envoy Not Reporting is an alert type in the Maintenance Alerts widget and Systems Status filter of the Installer Portal, not in your app. And the same condition has two names by tier: Production Issue in the Installer Portal, Low Solar Production in the Enphase App. In the app you will also meet Gateway Not Reporting (“If your gateway loses its internet connection, an error notification appears in the Enphase App, showing a Gateway Not Reporting alert”) and Microinverter Not Reporting / Microinverters Not Reporting, where affected panels render black on the ARRAY screen. Enphase notes that a gateway problem can make all microinverters “appear as ‘not reporting’ even if production continues”, and asks you to “allow up to 24–48 hours for the status to update”. Which of those conditions you have (one panel, some, or all) is worked through in Enphase microinverter not reporting.
The request for real push alerting is an old one, and it came from owners:
Could the envoy provide a push notification to i.e. my mobile phone or E-mail adress in case of a ‘system not reporting’ malfunction ? This would be vey helpful since my system sometimes goes down (partially) without me knowing so.
Background on the platform is on our Enphase monitoring page.
Growatt offline monitoring: nothing in the app, checkboxes in ShineServer
Start with the homeowner app. ShinePhone’s App Store listing describes energy monitoring, device management and AI smart control, and no alerts. Everything in that app is pull: you open it, you look.
Growatt’s alerts live in the ShineServer web portal: three tick-boxes for alerts, daily reports and monthly reports. Two things matter more than the boxes themselves:
- They are per email address, not per user: they are tied to the address entered when the station was set up. Whatever address was typed in when your station was created is where those messages go, and at commissioning that is usually the installer’s.
- You cannot tell from outside whether “receive alerts” is ticked. Do not assume it is off, and do not assume it is on. Log in to ShineServer on the web, open the station’s settings, and look at the state of the box and the address next to it.
Growatt’s automatic fault detection sits in the professional tier: ShineTools, the installer app. Be careful with third-hand thresholds: the “20-minute offline” figure repeated across the web is not in Growatt’s documentation. For the fault side of Growatt, see the Growatt error codes guide and our Growatt monitoring page.
None of the three tells you that you are simply producing less than you should
SolarEdge has no alert that compares your output with what you should have made. Its only production alerts are hard faults: “Production issue – inverter overheated” and “String is not producing”. A system that is up and communicating but making only a fraction of what it should raises nothing.
Enphase has the mechanism but hands the dial to the installer: the alert fires when “Site production falls below the Production Threshold (if one has been set)”. If nobody set one, there is nothing to fall below.
Growatt documents hard faults, warnings and scheduled daily and monthly reports, but no underperformance alerting.
The practical consequence: a total failure may reach you, late; a half-dead array will not reach you at all. Solmiro checks for both: every day it works out what the weather over your roof allowed, and it e-mails you when production falls well short of that or stops. Connecting is free. To check by hand, start with the signs that your panels are working.
What the delay costs
Auf Grund der Ablesung im Dez. 2013 habe ich festgestellt, das die Anlage viel mehr hätte bringen müssen. Bei der Prüfung wurde festgestellt, das 2 Strings auf Grund verschmorter Stecker nicht gearbeitet haben. Ich habe insgesamt ein Ertragsausfall von ca. 4000€.
In English: “From the December 2013 meter reading I established that the system should have produced far more. On inspection it was found that 2 strings had not been working, because of burnt connectors. In total I have a yield loss of about €4,000.”
What turns a fault into a bill is the number of days before anyone looks.
Who holds the account — and what to do if the installer has gone bust
The audit has a second half: even correctly configured alerts are useless if the login they hang off belongs to a company you no longer deal with. This is common, and it bites hardest exactly when the installer has disappeared:
For signing up they say everywhere that my installer has to do this for me, but I have no information on the installer.
What to establish, per brand:
- SolarEdge: is the site administered by an account whose role is account manager or account admin, and is that account yours or the installer’s? The alert-profile actions require those roles, and the “Expose to alerts notifications” toggle sits in the installer-side Admin → Site Access screen, so the answer decides whether you can change anything at all.
- Enphase: you can reach your own notification preferences at Menu → Account → My Notifications, but per-panel alerting is documented as an Installer Portal feature, so the granularity you may want is not on the owner tier.
- Growatt: the operative question is not “which boxes are ticked” but “which address”. Open the station configuration in ShineServer and read the address on it.
If the account holder is unreachable, manufacturer support is the route worth trying. Before you ring, have whatever identifies the site to hand: anything printed on the inverter, and anything in your handover pack.
The audit, in order
- Ten seconds of honesty first. When did you last open the app? If the answer is “when something felt wrong”, you already know the alerting is not doing the work.
- SolarEdge: ask the account holder in writing which alert rules are enabled on your site and whether “Expose to alerts notifications” is ticked for your email address. Neither is visible from the owner side. Expect at best a three-hour threshold and a daily digest.
- Enphase: in Menu → Account → My Notifications, confirm the channels and, if you want texts, that a mobile number is registered. Then count your panels and work out what 10% of them comes to. That is your real alert threshold.
- Growatt: ignore the phone app for this purpose. Log in to ShineServer on the web, open the station’s settings, and read the email address and the state of the alert and report checkboxes. Change the address to yours if it is not already.
- Write the date down. These interfaces move. An audit is only true on the day you do it.
Questions owners ask
Will SolarEdge email me when my inverter stops?
Only if three things are true at once: your installer enabled the relevant alert rule in the alert profile assigned to your site, the rule’s ‘System owners’ box is ticked (the documentation says it is checked by default for System owners), and the installer ticked ‘Expose to alerts notifications’ against your name under Admin → Site Access. The no-communication alert itself only fires after at least 3 hours of silence, and the default delivery is a daily roll-up email.
Does the Enphase app send a push notification when one microinverter stops?
Not on its own. Enphase’s documented thresholds are: at least one microinverter not reporting for 12 hours during daylight produces a Warning in the app and no push; a notification by text, email or push requires at least 10% of your microinverters not reporting for five consecutive days, and then only ‘depending on their selected preferences’. On an 11-panel roof, one dead panel is 9% and stays below the bar.
Does the Growatt ShinePhone app send alerts?
No. The ShinePhone App Store listing describes energy monitoring, device management and AI smart control, and no alerts. Growatt’s alerts are three tick-boxes in the ShineServer web portal (alerts, daily reports, monthly reports), sent to the e-mail address entered when the station was set up, which at commissioning is normally the installer’s.
Why do my solar alerts go to my installer?
Because that is who the systems were designed for. SolarEdge puts alert rules in the installer’s account and gates owner email behind an installer-granted permission; Enphase sells per-panel alerting as an Installer Portal benefit; Growatt attaches its alert checkboxes to the station email address set at commissioning, which is normally the installer’s.
Do any of them warn me if I am simply producing less than I should?
Not on their own. SolarEdge has no alert that compares your output with what you should have made. Enphase has a Production Issue / Low Solar Production alert, but it fires against a Production Threshold only ‘if one has been set’ by the installer. Growatt documents hard faults, warnings and scheduled reports, and no underperformance alerting.