Glossary
The terms, defined plainly.
Solar monitoring and AI sales both come with vocabulary that hides more than it explains. These are the words that matter, in plain language, with no assumed knowledge.
- String-level monitoring
- Monitoring that reports the output of each individual string of solar panels rather than only the system total. It matters because a system with one dead string still reports plausible-looking total production, so a failure can persist for months without triggering any alarm. Catching it requires comparing each string against what it should be producing, not against zero.
- Digital twin
- A software model of a physical solar system that predicts what it should be producing under current conditions, so actual output can be compared against expectation rather than against nothing. The comparison is what converts raw telemetry into a judgement about whether a system is healthy.
- Weather-adjusted baseline
- The output a solar system should be producing right now given the irradiance, temperature and cloud cover at its location. Comparing against a weather-adjusted baseline is what separates a real fault from a cloudy afternoon — without it, every overcast day looks like a problem and every gradual failure looks like weather.
- Performance ratio
- The ratio of a solar system's actual output to the output its installed capacity should have produced under the conditions it experienced, expressed as a percentage. A healthy residential system typically sits in the high seventies to mid eighties; a sustained drop indicates soiling, shading, degradation or a failed component.
- Speed-to-lead
- The elapsed time between a prospective customer making contact and receiving a first substantive response. It is one of the strongest predictors of conversion in inbound sales because prospects contact several companies at once and engage with whoever answers first. Our own median first response is 23 seconds, measured across 4,019 intervals.
- Orphaned solar system
- A solar installation whose original installer has gone out of business, leaving the homeowner with no one responsible for monitoring, warranty administration or repair. The hardware keeps producing, but nobody is comparing its output against expectation, so faults accumulate silently. Any monitoring platform that can reach the inverter brand through its cloud API can adopt these systems without a site visit.
- Care plan
- A recurring subscription an installer sells to a homeowner covering ongoing monitoring, fault alerts and periodic performance reporting on a system already installed. US care plans commonly price between $15 and $25 per month, and they convert an install base that is already paid for into recurring revenue.
- TCPA consent
- Permission a US consumer must give before a business may contact them by automated text or call, under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Compliant systems capture the consent, record when and how it was given, honour quiet hours and opt-outs, and keep an audit trail — the trail matters because the burden of proving consent falls on the sender.
- 10DLC
- The US carrier framework for sending application-to-person text messages over standard ten-digit long codes. Businesses register their brand and each messaging campaign with the carriers before sending; unregistered traffic is filtered or blocked. Registration is why an SMS product cannot simply be switched on for a new customer on day one.
- Inverter API
- The cloud interface an inverter manufacturer provides for reading data from systems using its hardware, usually authenticated with an account credential or OAuth token. Reading a fleet through these APIs requires no additional on-site hardware, because the inverter is already sending its data to the manufacturer's platform.
- kWh vs kW
- A kilowatt (kW) is a rate of power at an instant; a kilowatt-hour (kWh) is an amount of energy over time. A 10 kW system produces 10 kW at peak but perhaps 40 kWh across a day. System size is quoted in kW, electricity bills are charged in kWh, and confusing the two is the most common error in solar arithmetic.
- Net metering
- A billing arrangement in which a solar owner exports surplus generation to the grid and receives a credit against electricity drawn later. The value of that credit varies by jurisdiction and utility, and changes to net-metering rules are among the largest single influences on residential solar economics.
- Soiling
- Accumulated dust, pollen, salt or bird droppings on panel surfaces, reducing the light reaching the cells. Soiling losses build gradually and reverse after rain or cleaning, which is what distinguishes them from a hardware fault: the pattern is a slow decline followed by a sharp recovery.
- Degradation
- The gradual, permanent decline in a solar panel's output as it ages, typically a fraction of a percent per year and warrantied by manufacturers over twenty-five years. Because it is slow and expected, degradation should be modelled and subtracted before judging performance — otherwise a healthy older system reads as underperforming.
- Guardrails for AI
- Hard-coded constraints applied to an AI agent's output before it is sent, defining what it may not say or offer regardless of how a conversation develops. In sales the practical purpose is protecting price: our guardrail layer logged 1,630 interventions in five weeks, rewrote 49% of outgoing messages, and blocked 196 absolute price leaks.