VCOM Cloud

Total outage alarms

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About total outage alarms

Total outage alarms reflect a total outage of an inverter, a string combiner box, or the entire system. An alarm is triggered when the actual (measured) power drops below 1% of the nominal power.

Parameters

  • Monitoring period: To restrict alarms to daylight hours, tick the check box Sunrise to sunset and configure a delay if desired. If the incident occurs outside the defined time range, the alarm will be triggered once your defined time range begins.

  • Expected power: See Calculation methods for total outage and misproduction alarms.

  • Monitoring threshold: Monitoring begins once the expected power reaches the defined percentage of nominal power (= manufacturer's indication of the system's power output under normal conditions).

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Example

For example, with a 100 kW system and a threshold set to 7.5%, the alarm is only triggered if the expected power exceeds 7.5 kW and the other trigger criteria are met.

  • Delay after first occurrence: If you configure a delay, an alarm will only be triggered in case of persistent incidents. This helps to avoid alarms for deviations that only occur for a short time.

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Example

Based on the settings in the screenshot below:

  • No custom alarm profiles are used.

  • The monitoring period begins 30 minutes after sunrise and ends 30 minutes before sunset.

  • The machine learning simulation calculates the expected power.

  • When the monitoring threshold of 5% is exceeded, a critical alarm will be triggered if the outage persists beyond 30 minutes.

Total outage alarm settings
Total outage alarm settings

Custom alarm profiles

Learn about custom alarm profiles

Custom alarm profiles allow you to define how alarms behave for different component types and alarm categories in your system. With a custom alarm profile, you can:

  • Create more granular alarms for total outage, misproduction, and data outage alarms.

  • Enable or disable smart alarms per component type (= alarm level), for example, inverters, meters, string combiner boxes, sensors, and batteries. You can also consider the entire system as a component.

  • Total outage and misproduction alarms: Select a different severity, trigger criteria, and simulation method per alarm level.

  • See only relevant alarm levels (up to nine), depending on available components. For example, you cannot configure tracker or battery alarms if these components are not installed in your system.

When a component type is disabled in a custom alarm profile, all related alarms are suppressed. This avoids muting individual devices and ensures alarms are triggered only where monitoring is needed.

To use this feature, activate the toggle Custom alarm profiles under the respective alarm.

Note

If you have selected a method that does not produce a value, and all your inverters fail simultaneously, a basic default calculation based on the sun's position will be performed. This calculation simply checks if power should be available, without considering the configured nominal power value.