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

Description and use

A solar dashboard was built to aggregate live panel data, bill history, expected production, and device usage, revealing dead microinverters and mis‑mapped panels that caused a high electric bill.

Problem

Dad’s electric bill was unexpectedly high, and the author needed a way to verify whether the solar panels were contributing to the cost.

Outcome

The dashboard revealed that two microinverters were dead and several panels were underperforming due to incorrect orientation mapping, explaining a large portion of the high bill.

Workflow

• Collect per‑panel data from Enphase IQ Gateway every minute via local API
• Collect smart plug wattage from Home Assistant
• Fetch historical solar data from Enphase cloud API (free tier)
• Fetch bill data from ComEd Green Button export
• Fetch expected production from PVWatts
• Store data in Upstash Redis
• Generate AI briefing with Gemma 3 4B via Ollama 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

Our actual electric bills from ComEd, combined with the solar data to work out how much power the house really uses

Source

Gemma running locally on our home PC

Source