California Bay Area-based solar installer SolarCity plans to provide new performance monitoring hardware and software to its customers for free.

The company's internally-developed SolarGuard™ monitoring system is to collect, monitor and display critical performance data from solar systems, like production levels and local weather, and transmits that information to the company’s servers every 15 minutes through the Internet.

The system will evaluate the data for performance changes and will alert customers and help fix problems should they arise. A customer-accessible Web portal provides live data feeds and other information on the status of their system.

The system is designed to be able to detect and react to unforeseen events and hidden problems like fallen tree limbs, tripped circuit breakers and eroded wires, the company said.

The SolarGuard Web portal is to allow customers a way to see their solar investments in action.

Watching a meter spin backwards used to be just about the only way to see a grid-connected solar system at work. But performance monitoring systems like SolarGuard, and mature systems like those available from Fat Spaniel Technologies [1], allow customers to watch their collected solar data online with a new degree of interactivity and information.

Web portals let customers see how their systems operate, by viewing such data as output over time, weather information, and environmental savings equivalents, like CO2 emissions avoided—in an easy to use and easy to understand graphical format.

“The data we create with SolarGuard will enable us to protect the investments of our existing customers while pushing the industry to continually higher levels of reliability and accountability,” said Ben Tarbell, SolarCity’s Director of Products.

SolarCity's lead investor is Elon Musk [2], founder of PayPal and SpaceX, and chairman of Tesla Motors [3] and SolarCity.