The Monocle | CATCH Power

A monitoring platform that gives you precision, clarity and control in one place

The Monocle is the monitoring app that is compatible with suitable models of
CATCH Solar Relay

We know what you’re thinking, “Who needs another monitoring platform? Seen one, seen them all…”. But The Monocle will surprise you!

The Monocle uses live data to show every change in power in your home, consumed and generated. If a load turns on or off in your home, you will know about it within seconds, if not sooner. The only way to really know what is going on in your home is to see it happening, see it LIVE! The Monocle gives you this with our power widget.

Is your roof red or green?

If it is red, then you are consuming power from the grid.

If it is green, then you are exporting to the grid.

It’s a simple and easy to see indication of what is going on in your home,

but we can do better than that!

Load control - anytime, anywhere!
Now, from the comfort of your smart phone, you can control whatever load is connected to CATCH Solar Relay, all thanks to our new app The Monocle. Simply click on the load icon for control over turning the load off or on when it suits you. Send the instruction and the
load will be on or off in seconds!

The Energy Graph
Knowing what has transpired in your home through the day is also super important. This graph will instantly show you how much your home consumed and how much solar you generated. Then with one press of a button, you can see how much of your consumption was powered by the solar generation, and how much was exported to the grid.

Install multiple Relays and you will be able to get visibility on anything that you want to monitor or control, be it a specific load, another solar array, a particular phase. The flexibility is all there when the data for CATCH Solar Relay is monitored via The Monocle.
The details at your fingertips – Simply zoom into the graph to see all the details that you need at any time of the day. Then scroll across the graph with the slider, to clearly see the values of everything measured, at all times of the day.
Skip across to any day in the past since your Relay has been installed, so see what happened on that day.

Let’s Be Even Better with Our Solar!
How do we do this? We increase our self-consumption!
Feed-in tariffs (FiT) are always changing and are something that we have no control over. What we do have control over is the way that we consume some of the loads in our home.
Can you imagine receiving a FiT of $0.27/kWh? If that is the cost of your electricity, and you are able to match the load with solar production, then that is what you can expect if you power a load using solar. CATCH Solar Relay can do this for you and The Monocle can show it happening.

Utilisation is Where It’s At!
We are all about maximizing self-consumption of solar production. It’s good for you as the system owner (reduced power bills), its great for the environment (powering your home with a renewable energy source) and it is great for the network (too much solar in the network is a problem).

The average amount of household load that is powered from solar is approximately 30%.

Anything above that is a great result, for all of the reasons mentioned above. The Monocle measures this for you! See it quickly and easily, for any timeframe, on our utilisation page.

Once you have this insight you can make the changes to get better, and Get Good at Solar!

What of The Future?

Putting lots of solar on the roofs of Australian homes sounds like an awesome plan, and it is, but it’s more complicated than that. Trouble is brewing and we are seeing it already with export limits, inverter throttling, and sudden inverter specification changes. Voltage rise is everywhere in the grid!

The grid is being challenged with so much solar generation through the day, and knowing where to send it. At times there is more power generation than the grid needs, thanks mostly to solar, and this causes problems with the grid.
To date the way of managing this has been through system limitations and general curtailment, but that has it’s limits and in some parts of Australia we have past those limits already. Drastic changes are being made with short notice.

We have to be smarter than this if there is to be an acceleration in the energy transition away from fossil fuels, and it does need to be accelerated.
Your CATCH Solar Relay may be part of the solution!

The key is coordination of loads and generation, and guess what your Relay enables you to do? It is connected to the internet, so one day somebody may really appreciate the way that your system operates and may reward you in some way to better match the way your system interacts with the grid as a whole.

There is already the opportunity to participate in the wholesale electricity market through a retailer. Imagine if your system could respond to these market signals! With CATCH Solar Relay and The Monocle, they can!

This could be a reduction of solar exports, or turning on a load at a better time of the day.
There will be other markets that will reward those that are coordinating large collections of solar generation, and load to harmonise the network. If you opt to participate in these markets, then you could be handsomely rewarded, plus be playing a role in a better functioning network that can have more renewable energy installed in it!
And on a less positive note, there has already been talk about a “solar tax”, where retailers charge you for exporting solar energy to the grid when it doesn’t need it.
“How on earth can I stop that?”, which is a great question, and before CATCH Solar Relay there was no way that your solar exports could be controlled to avoid being charged for it. Now you can! CATCH Solar Relay connected to the internet via The Monocle, will make all of these opportunities available to owners of systems with CATCH Solar Relay installed when connected to the internet. The solutions will be wide and varied but it will all be made easy and seamless with CATCH Power products at your fingertips.

Make your system ready for the Future needs of the network and those that participate in it. It’s easy with CATCH Power.

CATCH Power are an Australian manufacturer of electronic products to help owners of solar PV systems to better utilize the energy they create. The Monocle has been created by our team of engineers with the owner in mind.