Sol-Ark manufacturer reportedly disables all Deye inverters in the US
Sol-Ark manufacturer reportedly disables all Deye inverters in the US
Seemingly, at the drop of a hat the morning of Friday, Nov 15th, Deye-branded inverters across the US were intentionally bricked.
WTF?
This is why cloudy systems are asking for trouble. I have several charge controllers at home - none of them connect to the internet, and although probably more expensive, I feel vindicated that this was the right choice....
If your device can be disabled remotely, it isn't your device.
I'm really looking forward to solar, but I will never touch anything I don't own myself, for this exact reason. They took the shitty business model of game "licensing" and applied it to physical goods. The other issue is that sometimes your power can go out and you've got solar panels, but they're owned by the utility company, run straight to the grid, and you're not allowed to use them, making them useless for you.
Damn I was planning on a sol-ark package in the spring...
Any recommendations for a non-connected (budget-friendly if possible) brand to look for?
I like the MorningStar brand, but they aren't cheap. I wrote a review here if you're interested: http://www.gogreenit.net/index.php?page=morningstar-tristar-60a-mppt
My preference has become Maximum Solar. They work with button and LCD control. It ain't convenient but I reprogram them only twice a year - when transitioning between summer (hot, energy surplus, preserve batteries by not charging them fully) and winter configurations (cold, energy deficit, fill batteries to the maximum). I've thought about automating that, but didn't bother.
I just installed a sol ark system, and can confirm that they work just as well with a pi and Solar Assistant. Not open source, but integrates well with homeassistant and no need for network connecting the actual electrical equipment, just usb.
I have a sol-ark and like it though this is concerning. In this case it's dyne on dyne branded and sol-ark has nothing to do with it, as far as we are aware.
If you don't care about the pretty graphs and data points and just want it to do it's job, then getting whatever inverter you want and not connecting to the net solves this problem. Alternatively, locking down traffic to and from this device is something I'll be looking at.
I never let my energy devices onto the Internet. The house controller - a Raspberry Pi - is allowed when I wire it to the router using an ethernet cable.
If I worked at the company which did the cyberattack, I would fear both civil liability and prosecution.