Remote access to any GivEnergy system.
Built for the engineers who fix them.

Sentinel is a remote-support tool for engineers and installers who work on GivEnergy solar-and-battery systems. It lets an approved installer pair to a customer's inverter, see it live, and diagnose faults remotely. It is not a consumer monitoring app — the audience is the person holding the spanner, not the homeowner.

No. Sentinel is built and run by RVTC LTD (parent of Solar Tech Support) and is not affiliated with GivEnergy Ltd or GivEnergy Software Ltd. It talks to the inverter over its existing local network connection — no GivEnergy cloud account required.

Nothing. Sentinel is free to approved installers. There are no tiers, no subscriptions and no per-use charges. It's given free to installers who are consistently rated 5★ — access is a mark of trust, and it can be withdrawn if standards slip.

Access is by application, not open signup. Apply and, once you're approved, you sign in with your work email — secured by Cloudflare Access — and Sentinel is tied to that identity. Ron approves each installer and can disable access at any time from an admin console. We prioritise installers with a consistent 5★ track record. Apply from the 'Apply for access' page.

Not instantly — it's application-only by design, so there's a review step. The desktop Mac and Windows apps are available to approved installers today (in beta). The iOS and Android apps are in review and coming soon; you can apply now for early access.

The Mac and Windows desktop apps are the current way engineers run Sentinel. They're beta builds, ad-hoc signed, so on first launch you'll approve them manually — on Mac, System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway; on Windows, More info → Run anyway at the SmartScreen prompt. Native iOS and Android apps are in review; we'll email approved installers when they land.

A tiny local agent runs on the customer's network (or you start a one-off session from the desktop app) and shows a six-character pairing code. The customer reads you the code; Sentinel establishes an encrypted outbound connection through a Cloudflare relay to your browser dashboard. Nothing to port-forward, no inbound firewall holes.

Sentinel is read-only by default. You can request a write, but the setting only changes after the customer taps “Allow” on their own device during an engineer-armed access window. Before the command reaches the inverter it is recorded to a permanent, tamper-evident audit log — hash-chained, append-only, and tied to the signed-in engineer and the system; if it can't be logged, the write is refused. The customer always stays in control; that safety invariant is deliberate and non-negotiable.

No — and that's on purpose. Sentinel is a tool for engineers who already know GivEnergy kit; it isn't a how-to for working on one, and we won't tell you what to change on a customer's system. That's your judgement and your responsibility. If you're not certain what you're doing, don't guess on live hardware — that's exactly what Solar Tech Support is for: hands-on diagnostics and repair, as a paid service. It's because the app puts real reach into someone's home that we only release it to trusted, application-approved engineers. What we're absolutely here for is the app itself: if you find a bug, a rough edge, or something you'd do differently, tell us — that feedback is genuinely welcome.

Single- and three-phase: GIV-AC, GIV-HY 3.0 / 3.6 / 5.0, GIV-HY3 (Gen 3), GIV-AIO and 3-phase units. Firmware D0.300+ is confirmed; older firmware usually works — tell us if you hit one that doesn't.

The local agent keeps reading the inverter over the LAN regardless. Remote access, alerts and the browser dashboard need the customer's connection up, because the relay runs over the internet — but nothing depends on a GivEnergy cloud account.

Yes. Access is a badge of trust tied to your approved installer account and your rating. If standards slip, access can be withdrawn. That's the deal that keeps the network trustworthy for the customers whose systems you're touching.

Yes — and we're upfront about it. Sentinel is built with a lot of AI assistance, but it's developed and overseen by an electronic engineer who studied software engineering as part of his degree — so the person signing off on every change understands both the hardware and the code. We're deliberately not rushing: the registers and the app in general are verified as we go, on real GivEnergy hardware, before anything reaches you. That caution is the whole reason Sentinel is application-only and read-only by default. If you ever spot a problem or have guidance for us, please get in touch — we'd genuinely rather hear it than not.

Every product change is recorded on the public Changelog at /changelog/ — new features, fixes and safety-relevant changes. We build in the open.