Anybody can tell you their solar makes plenty of power. A live number at two in the afternoon settles it.
So we put ours on the internet. The fleet leaderboard shows what Ape Solar systems are producing right now, updated through the day, straight off the inverters. Two of the systems on it are ours.
What the board shows
Every system posts five things: what it is making at this moment, today's total, the last 30 days, lifetime production, and whatever milestone it has earned.
Rank runs on the rolling 30 days rather than on lifetime. That keeps it a live race instead of a list of who turned on first. On a rolling month a good stretch of weather moves you up and a shaded week costs you a spot, so the order actually changes.
Lifetime is the trophy column. Cross 1 megawatt hour and the board calls you a Seedling. At 10 you are a Sunrunner. 50 makes you a Swamp Titan, and 100 megawatt hours makes you a Grid Legend. Go see for yourself who has taken which, because by the time you read this it may have moved.
At the bottom of the table there is an empty row waiting. That is not decoration. It is the seat.
Where the numbers come from
Every system on the board reports to Canopy, the monitoring app Josh built to watch our own gear. A job on the shop machine reads Canopy and writes the latest readings to the page about every 15 minutes.
Nothing on the board is estimated or projected. It is what the inverters metered, kilowatt hour by kilowatt hour.
The part worth explaining is what happens when a feed dies. That is the moment a live number is easiest to fake, so here is what ours does instead. A reading older than 45 minutes stops counting as "right now" and the board prints n/a in its place. The fleet total at the top of the page is stricter still. If any single system has gone quiet, the whole live number drops to n/a rather than showing a sum with a plant missing from it. A stale reading dressed up as a live one is worse than a blank, because you will believe it.
Why ours went up first
Two of the rows are ours, and both of those systems sit in Gulf Breeze. One is the off-grid house. The other is a net-metered mining operation.
They went up first, two weeks before there was any way for a customer to join them. Publishing our own numbers before asking anybody else to publish theirs seemed like the right order. If the board is going to have a bad month on it, that month should be ours.
Your system, only if you want it
Customer systems go on the board by opt-in and no other way. The setting ships off. You turn it on inside the Canopy app and pick a handle, and that handle is the only thing anyone sees. No name, no address, no note about what is happening at your house. Skip the opt-in and there is no row at all.
What a leaderboard cannot tell you
It measures production, and production is not a power bill. Two houses can sit far apart on this board and land close together at the end of the month, because what your bill does depends on what you use and what your utility pays you for the rest. A big number up top is not the same as a small number in the mailbox.
So read the board as the one thing it honestly is. A public record of what these systems put on the meter, day after day, instead of a figure off a brochure.
That is a smaller claim than most solar advertising makes. It is also one you can check at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday, which is the part we like about it.
Go watch them move on the leaderboard. If you want your roof in the race, run the free estimate and see what it would put up.
Ready for Anything.