Made by one person who got left in the dark too.

In September 2024, SunPower’s app, web portal, and support line all went dark. Overnight, hundreds of thousands of homeowners — people who’d spent $20,000–$40,000 on solar — lost the ability to see whether their own system was even working. No dashboard. No alerts. No one to call.

I’m one of those owners. And as someone who likes to actually see my data, being shut out drove me up the wall. Worse than the inconvenience was the feeling: you trusted a company, you paid them, and they walked away and took your visibility with them.

You already know your panels kept working. Here’s what almost nobody realizes: the box by your electrical panel never stopped either. Your PVS gateway has been recording every panel, every couple of minutes — output, voltage, temperature — the whole time, on your own network. That data didn’t go anywhere. It’s sitting in a box you own, in a format nobody handed you a way to read.

So I built a small box that plugs into your existing SunPower PVS gateway and reads it directly, on your own Wi-Fi. No SunPower servers required — because they’re gone. It brings your system back online, shows you every panel, and quietly watches for the silent failures (a dead panel, a fading one, an offline gateway) that otherwise cost you for months before you’d ever notice on a bill.

WattHacker is deliberately independent. It isn’t SunPower, SunStrong, or Maxeon, and it isn’t tied to whoever installed your panels. That’s on purpose: no one who sold you the system can switch this off or disappear with your data.