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PV Monitoring Costs Reduced With Heliotronics SunLoggerE Series

February 25, 2013 by Jeff Shepard

Capitalizing on steep cost reductions in embedded systems, Heliotronics, Inc. is redefining the economics of monitoring and maintaining commercial PV systems through the introduction of the SunLoggerEâ„¢ data monitoring system. This revenue grade system takes recent commoditization of data acquisition hardware, an innovative new web based user interface and leverages Heliotronics' mature data server back end to provide a reliable, powerful and economical turnkey package at an unprecedented price point. The SunLoggerEâ„¢ is suitable for monitoring systems from 10kW to megawatt scale.

According to Clayton Handleman, president of Heliotronics, "most of the revenue systems on the market cater to projects developed with an SREC market north of $500 / SREC and system sizes in excess of half a megawatt. Under those conditions gold-plated data systems were justified. However as SREC markets have collapsed, winning bids can boil down to a few thousand dollars. We have optimized the feature mix to provide a great product priced to win contracts."

The SunLoggerE™ systems eliminate the frills but include features that are now considered essential for any commercial system. These include ANSI C12.2 energy sensors with accuracy class 0.2, ModBus communications and email. The Heliotronics’ technical team has developed a robust performance factor model that assures early warning in the event of system degradation or malfunction.

Industry firsts include a data logger with a more than 20 years of non-volatile onsite data storage and data caching measured in decades rather than the industry standard 1 month. Inspired by the simple Google home page, Heliotronics offers a streamlined, patent pending, interface that gets you the information you most need at-a-glance on your PC, tablet or smart phone from which detailed information is accessed more efficiently and easily.