topic Re: Solar PV in Broadband

Solar PV

Ian2905 — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 10:36:25 GMT

Hello

We have Solar PV. The inverter (and dongle) is in our loft. The dongle connects to our wifi just fine but reporting is very patchy.

You will see from our records that we had an old style router - this worked perfect with the Solar PV and via my solarman app i could look how my solar panels were doing and it woud update around every 8 minutes.

You then told me my router was no good and that it wasnt secure so you sent me an updated router. After set up the Solar PV was not working well with the new router. It would only report data twice a day instead of once every 8 minutes. Having spoken with your colleagues they suggested updating to hub 6 (at extra cost). I have now updated to hub 6 and my Solar PV reports even less frequently, sometimes not even once a day.

I have spoken to the Solar PV team and of course they blame the new sky router. Their product was working on your older tech router so i tend to agree that it is your new routers that are at fault. How can we correct this problem? Thank you for your assistance. Ian

Re: Solar PV

GD1 — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 10:42:59 GMT

@Ian2905 This is a customer led community, no one here would have told you to upgrade anything.

Re: Solar PV

TimmyBGood — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 12:49:25 GMT

@Ian2905 wrote:

You then told me my router was no good and that it wasnt secure so you sent me an updated router. After set up the Solar PV was not working well with the new router. It would only report data twice a day instead of once every 8 minutes. Having spoken with your colleagues they suggested updating to hub 6 (at extra cost). I have now updated to hub 6 and my Solar PV reports even less frequently, sometimes not even once a day.

Presumably you started with a 2016 Q Hub (or older model) : it's correct that those no longer meet UK regulations regarding security of internet access devices, specifically because they have fixed simple Administrator credentials which isn't permitted any more.

You were probably moved to a 2019 Sky Broadband Hub, which being upright generated a different WiFi signal pattern.

Unfortunately 'upgrading' customers to a Max Hub by having them add the WiFi Max subscription supplement appears to be largely a sales thing: reports of Max Hubs underperforming are a significant proportion of posts to this forum.

Sky won't revert you to a Q Hub because that's just not permitted by government. It's your choice whether to persist with Max (and perhaps claim one or more booster 'pods') or cancel that add-on and put the saving towards Powerline networking adapters or a third-party mesh solution.

Re: Solar PV

Ian2905 — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 19:32:00 GMT

I thought sky was on this group. My mistake.