n8n Solar Monitoring Workflow: Open-Meteo + Slack Alerts

Spot solar underperformance and get instant Slack alerts—daily, with Open‑Meteo forecasting

This n8n Solar Monitoring Workflow pulls your solar production and grid usage data, compares it against Open‑Meteo weather forecasts to estimate expected output, and posts a clear Slack daily summary—or escalates if performance drops or daylight production goes to zero.

What this workflow does

• Runs daily at 19:00 (or you can trigger a manual test run) to start a complete monitoring cycle.
• Fetches hourly solar production from your solar provider API and hourly grid/meter usage from your utility or smart‑meter API.
• Pulls hourly weather inputs for the day (cloud cover and shortwave radiation forecast) from the Open‑Meteo API.
• Models expected solar generation from the weather data, then compares expected vs. actual output to flag efficiency drops and zero production during daylight.
• Calculates energy and costs by time interval, including self-consumption, grid import/export totals, peak usage, and a peak/off‑peak tariff‑weighted grid import cost.
• Generates a daily report with a severity level (none/warning/critical) plus a troubleshooting checklist.
• Posts to Slack when no alert is required; otherwise it pauses for acknowledgement and performs a resolution confirmation check via wait webhooks, then posts either a resolution-confirmed message or an escalation if not acknowledged/resolved.

Use cases

• Detect declining panel performance early by comparing actual generation to Open‑Meteo-based expectations.
• Monitor grid import/export patterns and peak usage with automated tariff-weighted cost estimates.
• Operational alerting: notify your team in Slack, require acknowledgement, and confirm resolution before closing.

Technical details

• Core nodes/logic: if, set, code, wait, slack, and sticky note.
• Integrations: HTTP Header Auth to your solar monitoring API and utility/smart‑meter API, plus Open‑Meteo API for cloud cover and shortwave radiation forecasting, and Slack for reporting/acknowledgement workflows.