What actually happened
If the mySunPower app stopped loading, stopped updating, or now asks you to pay, nothing is wrong with your roof. SunPower filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2024, and all official support went dark on September 20, 2024 — the mySunPower app, the customer web portal, and the 1-800-SUNPOWER phone line, all at once. Around 600,000 residential systems lost visibility overnight.
SunStrong Management took over the monitoring platform and rebuilt the app. Its focus is primarily lease and PPA customers. If you bought your system outright — especially if it was installed on or before September 30, 2024 — you are the most orphaned group of all: the rebranded SunPower (Complete Solar) explicitly does not assume your warranty or service obligations.
First: is your system actually working?
This is the question underneath the question, and it's the one almost every owner asks first. Three ways to sanity-check without any app at all:
- Look at your gateway. The PVS5 or PVS6 is the white box near your electrical panel. Lights on and no alarm state means it's powered and running.
- Look at your utility bill. Compare this month's net usage against the same month last year. Solar output varies with weather and season, so month-over-month tells you little — but a year-over-year collapse is a real signal.
- Look at your meter mid-day. On a clear sunny afternoon, a working solar system usually pushes the meter toward or past zero. If it doesn't, that's worth investigating.
None of these tell you about an individual panel. A single dead microinverter out of thirty costs you roughly 3% of production — invisible on a bill, invisible at the meter, and it can run for years. That's the gap the app used to fill.
Your options now, honestly
1. The SunStrong app (free tier)
SunStrong rebuilt the app with a free "Basic" tier — real-time power flow and system health — and a Premium tier at about $9.99/mo or roughly $99/year for historical data, panel-level monitoring and analytics. If you only want to know the system is on, the free tier may be enough. Be aware that owners widely resent paying for data they previously had for free, and some who prepaid annual monitoring report receiving no data after their subscription anniversary.
2. Do it yourself (free, technical)
Your PVS gateway has a local API on its installer LAN port, and an active open-source community reads it directly. Home Assistant integrations (krbaker/hass-sunpower, smcneece/ha-esunpower), thomastech/SunPower-Web-Monitor, and pypvs are all real, free and well-documented. Several predate the 2024 bankruptcy.
The honest caveats: setup generally needs an isolated network segment to avoid DHCP conflicts, polling the gateway too aggressively can destabilise it (it was never designed for sustained calls), and the target moves — a September 2025 firmware update added authentication and broke every simple local setup with 403 errors until people worked around it. If you enjoy this kind of thing, it genuinely works and costs nothing.
3. A turnkey independent monitor
This is what Watt Hacker is: the same local-gateway approach, packaged so you don't have to build or maintain it. Details below.
While you're here: check your equipment warranties
This is the part most owners miss, and it has deadlines. SunPower's company warranty is effectively worthless now — but the equipment warranties from the original manufacturers survive, and they're now split across several vendors that you have to claim from individually:
- Enphase (microinverters) — honored, but parts only; labor coverage was eliminated.
- Maxeon (panels) — honored, but required self-registration by December 31, 2024. That deadline has passed for many owners.
- Qcells, Fronius, REC, Fimer — equipment-only, excluding labor and shipping.
The first step is always the same: find your original installation contract and identify which manufacturer made each component. It's worth an hour of your time.
Where Watt Hacker fits
Watt Hacker is a small monitor that plugs into your existing SunPower PVS5 or PVS6 gateway on your own home network and reads it directly. It doesn't rely on SunPower's or SunStrong's servers, because for owners like you those are either gone or behind a paywall. No electrician and no rewiring.
- The monitor is $50 once (list $100), with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
- Kilowatt is free forever — live power and per-panel status, no card on file. $58 to start (monitor + $8 shipping).
- Megawatt adds full history, dollar-framed alerts and reports: $8/mo, or $72/yr ($6/mo). 1 month free with a monitor, free shipping, cancel anytime.
- Built by one person, not a company that can be sold out from under you. Who's behind it.
Common questions
Is my solar system broken if the mySunPower app stopped working?
Almost certainly not. The app going dark is a company failure, not a hardware failure. SunPower shut down its support operations on September 20, 2024, taking the mySunPower app, the customer web portal and the 1-800-SUNPOWER line with it. Your panels and inverters kept running the entire time — they generate power whether or not anything is reporting on them.
Can I get the mySunPower app back?
No. The original mySunPower app is gone and is not coming back. SunStrong Management took over and rebuilt it as a freemium app, but many owners who bought their systems outright find it does not serve them well. Independent options read your gateway directly on your own network instead.
Why does the app say bad communications?
In March 2025 SunStrong changed the servers the PVS gateway reports to, and updated PVS5 and PVS6 units but not legacy PVS2 units. That left PVS2 owners with 'bad communications' errors even though every physical indicator on the equipment looked normal.