A solar panel meter enclosure that powers and connects a meter where there is no electrical service and no network drop — solar array, sealed battery, charge controller, meter inputs and cellular or LoRaWAN backhaul, pre-wired and commissioned as one assembly.
What the panel is
The solar powered metering panel is a pre-wired outdoor enclosure containing a photovoltaic array, a sealed battery, a charge controller, DC power distribution for the meter and radio, terminal blocks for pulse, Modbus RS-485 or 4–20 mA meter inputs, and the communications module — cellular router or LoRaWAN node. It arrives assembled and tested, so field work is mounting the enclosure, aiming the array, and landing the meter wires.
The problem it solves
Most metering points that never get metered fail on infrastructure, not on hardware cost. A well head, a tank farm, an irrigation header, a remote compressor skid, a construction trailer or an outbuilding has flow worth measuring and neither a spare circuit nor an Ethernet run within reach. Trenching power and data to that point routinely costs several times the meter. A solar panel meter assembly removes both trenches: the array supplies the power, and the radio supplies the network.
What ships with it
- Outdoor-rated, lockable enclosure with mounting hardware for pole or wall.
- Photovoltaic array sized to the site's latitude, tilt and reporting interval.
- Sealed maintenance-free battery with multi-day autonomy plus charge controller with low-voltage disconnect.
- Regulated DC output for the meter and the radio, fused and terminated.
- Meter input terminals for pulse (dry contact), Modbus RTU over RS-485, or 4–20 mA.
- Backhaul module: 4G/LTE cellular router with antenna, or LoRaWAN node paired to your gateway.
- Wiring diagram, commissioning record and a dashboard-ready point list.
Typical applications
- Water and irrigation. Well heads, booster stations, irrigation headers and tank fills, usually paired with a meter from our water submetering range.
- Compressed air and process gas. Yard compressors and skid-mounted equipment outside the building envelope — see compressed air flow meters.
- Distributed portfolios. Cell sites, pump stations, agricultural sites and outbuildings reporting into one dashboard, as in multi-site portfolio energy management.
- Temporary and construction metering. Sites that need measured data for a season and then move.
- Retrofits that cannot take an outage. Points where running new power would mean shutting down the process — see retrofit submetering without a shutdown.
Installation notes
Mount the enclosure where the array has unshaded southern exposure for most of the day and where the antenna has line of sight away from metal structures. Confirm carrier signal strength before the panel is built if the backhaul is cellular; confirm gateway range if it is LoRaWAN. Keep the meter run within the cable length quoted for the chosen signal type — RS-485 tolerates long runs, dry-contact pulse tolerates less. Commissioning is a bench-test repeat: energize, confirm the meter reads, confirm the first packet lands in the dashboard.
How it pairs with the rest of the system
The panel is a power and transport layer, not a measurement device — it reports whatever meter you attach. Pair it with an ultrasonic or positive-displacement water meter, a thermal mass air or gas meter, or a pulse-output BTU meter, and read it in the same dashboard as your building metering. Where several remote points share a site, back them onto one gateway from the connectivity range and integrate them alongside wired meters using the integration components you already run.
