ENERPLAIN / FIELD NOTES
Before you accept a new connection
A compact review checklist for one source-to-application energy-data connection, with explicit expectations, reproducible differences and visible unknowns.
The question to answer: does this specific connection preserve the meaning agreed with the source and the receiving application? A successful request or a populated dashboard alone does not answer it.
This is a proposed review method. It is not certification, an industry standard or proof that a live integration is correct.
1. Bound the comparison
- Name one source, one destination and the exact versions or export formats under review.
- Choose one allowed data window and a declared device set.
- Record who approves the data-sharing method. Prefer a fictional or manually recreated example for an initial email.
- State what is outside the review: hardware condition, electrical safety, savings and unrelated connectors.
2. Write the expected meaning
- Identity: device identifiers, record keys and the treatment of duplicate deliveries.
- Time: UTC or local convention, named zone, offset, interval start/end and window boundaries.
- Values: metric, unit, scaling, sign and precision. Power in kW and interval energy in kWh are different quantities.
- States: absent, measured zero, invalid, estimated, delayed and revised records.
- Completeness: expected reporting cadence and legitimate exceptions, including nighttime behaviour.
3. Preserve a reproducible discrepancy
For each finding, keep the approved source example, the corresponding application result, the expected transformation rule and a minimal reproduction. Separate an explained difference from an unresolved one. A report should make it possible for another engineer to repeat the comparison.
For example, the missing-zero fixture has eight expected interval starts, seven source observations and eight downstream values. The finding is the silent zero fill at 00:30 UTC; the equipment condition remains unknown.
4. Agree how findings are handled
- Give each finding an owner and an agreed acceptance condition.
- Distinguish a blocking contract violation from an explicitly accepted limitation.
- Test revisions, retry behaviour and late arrivals only where the source contract requires them.
- Keep the release decision with the team responsible for the integration.
5. Handing a PV portfolio over: what to ask for
The same questions apply when a portfolio changes hands and the records arrive as exports rather than through an integration. Ask the outgoing party for each of these before the window you intend to review:
- A site and device register with stable identifiers, so a site that appears in one export and not in another can be recognised as the same site.
- For every file, which source or portal export produced it, when it was exported, and which filters or date range were applied.
- The meaning and unit of every field, including whether energy is an interval quantity or a cumulative counter.
- The reporting window and expected cadence, the timezone and UTC offsets used, and whether a timestamp labels the start or the end of its interval.
- How missing records are represented, kept explicitly separate from a measured zero.
- Any records that could not be mapped to a known site or device, listed rather than dropped.
- Who owns each source, which reference it is quoted from, and the review cutoff both sides agree to measure against.
Two answers are worth writing down: a site that was never mapped into a portal does not appear in that portal's overview at all, and a site that still reports can be missing one of its expected devices. An overview alone does not establish that every expected site and device is mapped and supplying complete records; comparing it with the expected register does. Whether a particular portal raises an alert when a mapped device stops arriving is a property of that portal — check it rather than assume it.
What Enerplain currently sells
This checklist is a technical reference, not a product. The offer Enerplain currently sells is the Portfolio Blind-Spot Snapshot: a 30-day, read-only reconciliation of a site list against the records two monitoring portals actually received, delivered as a written exception list. It uses the same discipline as the checklist above, applied to a portfolio rather than to one connection.
There is no live connector or upload service on this website. Describe a difficult check without credentials, customer identifiers, addresses or raw telemetry. A short, non-sensitive description is enough.