If I install solar, what happens at night?

At night your solar system will shut itself down. This includes the inverter, which means you won’t be able to read its display and see any information from it until the sun comes up in the morning.

While this may be a bit of an inconvenience if you wanted to check your production for the day, the system does this for a very good reason.

During the day when your panels are producing power the inverter uses some of this power to operate itself. At night without any power from the solar panels the inverter would have to draw power from the grid to operate itself, which is exactly what the solar system is put in their to avoid – drawing from the grid.

A few inverters may have small battery storage to run the displays etc. through the night. However, because of the added expense and size it takes to include the battery in the inverter versus the small gain in convenience, these types of inverters are almost extinct.