Live status icons

What these widgets are for

The live status icons are the dashboard's at-a-glance live readouts. Each one is a small tile showing a single live value — solar power, grid power, load, battery, or generator — overlaid on a picture so you can read the site's state in one look. They update on their own as new readings stream in: no clicking, no refreshing.

Use them when you want a permanent "what is happening right now?" strip across the top of your dashboard. For history and trends use the chart widgets instead; for an animated picture of how energy is moving between these, add the Power Flow widget.

This article covers all six icons in the family:

PV Power — site solar output.
PV Devices — combined output of selected PV devices, when you only want some of them.
Grid Power — utility-grid import or export.
Load Power — total site consumption.
Battery Power — battery charge / discharge and state of charge.
Generator Power — generator output.

Companion guides

Dashboard overview — how to add, move, resize, and remove widgets, and how to organise Views.
Energy Production & Consumption chart — the totals-over-time companion. Pair this with the icons for "now vs. today" views.
Device Historical Analytics chart — when you need to see history of a specific device, not the plant-wide total.

Where to find them

Open the Dashboard, click the pencil icon to enter edit mode, then click Add New Widget. Search the picker for the icon you want — PV Power, Grid Power, Load Power, Battery Power, Generator Power, or PV Devices — and click Add Widget. Each icon drops onto your dashboard as a 2 × 2 tile that you can resize up to about 4 × 4 if you want it bigger.

Add as many as you need: the typical pattern is a row of four or five icons (PV, Battery, Grid, Load, optionally Generator) along the top of a View.

What each icon shows

PV Power

The site's total solar production right now, in kW (or kVA — see Choosing what value to display below). One number, on top of a solar-panel illustration.

PV Devices

The same idea as PV Power, but for a chosen subset of PV devices instead of the whole site. Useful when a site has several PV strings or several solar arrays and you only want to track some of them — for example one roof, or one phase. Pick which devices to include from the gear settings; the icon shows the combined live output of just those.

Grid Power

The utility grid power, in kW (or kVA), with the sign convention indicating direction:

Positive values mean the site is drawing from the grid (importing).
Negative values mean the site is sending to the grid (exporting).

If a site has no grid connection or the meter is offline, the value stays at zero.

Load Power

The site's total consumption right now, in kW (or kVA). Includes everything connected to the loads: lights, equipment, HVAC, etc. This is the number to watch when answering "what are we using?".

Battery Power

The battery's live activity, with two readouts on one tile:

Power — how much energy the battery is moving right now. The sign tells you the direction: charging or discharging. The number is shown in W / kW / MW depending on magnitude.
State of charge (SoC) — the percentage full, with a coloured arc on the illustration that fills as SoC rises and empties as it falls. The numeric percentage is shown next to the arc.

The Battery icon uses VA (apparent power) for its power reading — there's no W / VA toggle on this icon. The other icons in the family let you choose.

Generator Power

The generator's live output, in kW (or kVA). Zero when the generator isn't running. Useful for sites with backup or hybrid generators in the mix.

Choosing what value to display

Most icons (PV Power, Grid Power, Load Power, Generator Power) let you choose between two flavours of power from the gear settings:

W — real (active) power. What you actually use, what bills are based on, and what most people expect. This is the default.
VA — apparent power. Includes the reactive component too. Always equal to or larger than W. Useful when you're looking at equipment sizing or investigating power-factor issues.

Open the gear icon on the tile, set Value Display to W or VA, and the tile updates. The selection saves with the tile so reopening the dashboard remembers your choice.

The Battery icon doesn't expose this toggle (it uses VA for its power readout). The PV Devices icon has its own settings instead — see below.

The PV Devices icon's settings

The PV Devices icon has a richer settings dialog because it needs to know which devices to include:

Select devices — a checklist of every PV device the site is reporting. Tick the ones you want included in the combined power total; untick the rest.
Title — the icon will pick a default name based on what you selected, but you can override it (for example Roof A).

Ticking different devices changes the live total straight away. Add several PV Devices icons with different selections if you want to compare two groups side by side.

Reading the numbers

Units scale automatically. Small values show as W; thousands as kW; millions as MW. The unit suffix always appears next to the number — read both.
A reading of 0.00 kW means "we're getting zero from this stream right now", not "no data". A genuinely missing value (the device went offline, the meter is unreachable) shows nothing or a stale value until fresh data arrives.
Signs matter on Grid and Battery. A positive vs. negative number tells you direction:
- Grid: positive = importing, negative = exporting.
- Battery: the sign and the SoC arc together tell you whether the battery is charging (filling, SoC rising) or discharging (emptying, SoC falling).
The PV Devices icon's number is the sum of all ticked devices, not the average.

Read the icons left-to-right as the energy flow: PV (produced) → Battery (stored / released) → Load (consumed) → Grid (the difference, in or out). Arranged that way, the row tells a story.

Who can do what

Any signed-in user can add the icons to their dashboard, choose which value to display (W or VA), pick devices for the PV Devices icon, and read the live values. The icons are read-only — they never send a command back to a device.

Common issues

The number is "stuck" or stale. The icon shows the last value that arrived. If new values stop coming (gateway offline, network glitch), the displayed number won't update until the stream resumes. The Auto Update option in your View Settings controls a periodic background refresh — leaving it on helps reconnect after a glitch.
Battery SoC arc looks empty or full and doesn't move. Confirm the battery is reporting at all (the power number changes). A static value usually means the SoC field is missing from the data stream; raise it with support.
Grid Power is hovering around zero with the sign flipping. That's normal on sites with a battery and grid-tie: the battery is taking up the slack and the grid is settling near neutral. Watch the trend in the Energy Production & Consumption chart's Daily Grid Import / Grid Export totals for the bigger picture.
PV Devices icon shows zero with devices selected. Either none of the selected devices are producing right now (e.g. at night), or the selection only has offline devices. Untick offline ones and tick at least one producing device.

Tips and gotchas

Keep one matching pair: an icon and a chart. An icon answers "now"; the matching chart answers "over time". Together they make sense; one without the other is half the story.
Pick a unit and stick to it across icons. Mixing W on some icons and VA on others on the same dashboard is hard to read at a glance. Set them all the same.
Resize icons up for board-mounted screens. The 2 × 2 default is fine for a desktop browser, but if the dashboard is going on a wall screen the icons read better at 3 × 3 or 4 × 4.
Use the PV Devices icon for ad-hoc groupings. When a site has, say, two roofs that you bill separately, two PV Devices tiles (one per roof) gives a per-roof live readout that PV Power alone can't.