⚡ Dad Complains About Electric Bill, So I Built Him an Energy Dashboard and Found the Panels Lied ⚡

Description and use

A solar energy dashboard was built to consolidate live panel data, household consumption, and bills, uncovering mis‑mapped panels and dead microinverters that explain the high electric bill.

Problem

High electric bill and uncertainty about solar panel performance.

Outcome

The dashboard revealed that several panels were mis‑mapped and underperforming, and that two microinverters were dead, explaining a significant portion of the high bill.

Workflow

• Collect live panel data from Enphase gateway every minute
• Collect smart plug data from Home Assistant
• Fetch historical solar data from Enphase cloud API
• Download ComEd Green Button bills
• Retrieve PVWatts expected production
• Store data in Upstash Redis
• Generate problems list (dead microinverters, underperforming panels, token expiry, usage spikes)
• Run Gemma 3 4B locally to create a plain‑English briefing every 6 h
• Publish dashboard on Vercel with password protection

Evidence

Live data from our solar panels, straight from the Enphase gateway on our home network, every minute, down to each individual panel

Source

A Problems list that flags dead microinverters, panels producing less than their neighbors, expiring tokens, and big jumps in home usage

Source

The open‑source AI piece is Gemma 3 4B running in Ollama on that same home PC

Source