Solar on OGLAS — Off-Grid Local Alert System

Power Management

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Power management sensors read the system that keeps everything else running: your solar and battery setup. They’re sensors like any other in OGLAS — they measure something off the world and report it — but what they measure is power production, battery state, and load, and they make it available to your hubs, your dashboards, and your smart switches.

The first of these reads a Victron MPPT.

Victron MPPT

If your power comes from solar — most off-grid sites — the Victron power-management sensor pulls production data into the same dataset as everything else.

Smart Switch

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The OGLAS Smart Switch is the active end of the network. Where the other sensors measure and report, the Smart Switch acts — turning a load on and off based on conditions you’ve defined, and reporting back not just whether it switched but whether the load is actually working.

What it does

A Smart Switch decides whether to be on or off using one or more of:

Power-management data — reads incoming watts, battery state, and load from a power-management sensor (e.g. Victron MPPT). Run the relay on stable solar surplus.
Sensor data — subscribe to readings from other OGLAS sensors. Tank dropped below 200 mm? Soil moisture below threshold? Battery bank above 90 %? React.
Web / API data — when Wi-Fi is available, pull from a local server, MQTT broker, or HTTP endpoint. Used for off-property triggers that need external data.
Weather data — forecast and current conditions from a weather API. “Run only when the next 6 hours are clear” is one rule that uses this.

Multiple inputs combine with AND/OR rules in the device config. None of this requires a cloud account — see Your data is your data.

Off-grid power

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

If your site runs on solar or batteries, every sensor’s power budget matters. OGLAS sensors are designed to spend most of their life asleep, and only the devices that need to listen continuously stay awake.

Battery sensors

The analog node and most “report a reading every minute” sensors:

Run on a single LiPo cell (3.7 V, 1000–2000 mAh is plenty).
Deep-sleep between samples — current draw drops to microamps.
Wake, read, send, wait for confirmation, sleep — the whole cycle is under a second of activity per minute.
Survive a full season on a charge for typical reporting intervals; longer with solar trickle.

We select hardware specifically for ultra-low deep-sleep current on battery-powered sensors. Slightly higher-power variants are available for always-on devices — pick the one that suits your install.