Your own Home Assistant · nothing in between

Your solar system, right in the menu bar.

SolarWatcher is a native macOS menu-bar app that shows your home solar and battery at a glance — live production, battery state, household load — reading straight from your own Home Assistant. It talks directly to your instance. No third-party cloud.

Download for Mac See how it works Free · Apple-notarized
at a glance · production → battery → load ☀ live from Home Assistant

The menu-bar title updates on its own — and pauses when your display sleeps, then refreshes the moment you wake it.

What it does

The whole system, from the top-right corner of your screen.

Live production in the menu bar. A tap opens the full picture. Everything reads from your own Home Assistant.

01 / glance

Live production in the menu bar

Your current solar output sits in the macOS menu bar and refreshes itself. It's sleep/wake aware — polling pauses when the display sleeps and picks back up the instant you wake it, so it isn't hammering your Home Assistant while you're away.

menu bar☀ 4.82 kW
display asleep— paused —
on wakerefreshed
02 / detail

A popover with the full picture

One tap opens total PV power and per-string inputs, today's production, battery level with charge/discharge state, estimated time remaining and temperature, and household load. Plus the dollar value of what you've made — today and all-time.

total PV4.82 kW
battery72% · charging
value all-time$1,284
03 / yours

Configured to your setup

Every reading maps to a Home Assistant entity ID you choose, so it works with any solar setup — not one specific inverter. Set fault alerts as macOS notifications, and turn on an optional EV gas-savings comparison if you have one.

sensor.pv_powermapped
fault alerton
EV savingsoptional

In the popover

Production on one side. Battery and load on the other.

Everything you'd want to check before you plug in the car or run the dryer — laid out plainly, read live from the sensors you already have in Home Assistant.

PRODUCTION solar · today from your PV sensors
Total PV powerright now
4.82 kW
Per-string inputsPV1 · PV2
2.71 · 2.11 kW
Produced todaysince midnight
21.4 kWh
Value todayat your rate
$5.12
Value all-timesince you started
$1,284
every figure maps to a Home Assistant entity you pick
BATTERY & LOAD storage · house live state
Battery levelcharging
72%
Time remainingto full, at this rate
≈ 1h 40m
Battery temperaturepack sensor
24 °C
Household loadconsuming now
1.63 kW
EV gas savingsoptional comparison
$0.94 today
Configurable inverter fault alerts arrive as native macOS notifications.
charge/discharge state, time remaining and temperature come straight from your inverter's sensors

How it works

Straight to your Home Assistant. Nothing in the middle.

You point it at your own instance once. From then on it just reads sensors — locally, on your terms.

  1. Connect — your URL and a token

    Paste your Home Assistant URL and a long-lived access token. That's the whole setup — nothing is stored anywhere but on your Mac.

  2. Map — your sensor entities

    Tell it which entity_id is PV power, which is battery level, load, temperature, and so on. Any solar setup works, because you choose the entities.

  3. Watch — live in the menu bar

    Current production shows in the menu bar and refreshes automatically. Open the popover any time for the full breakdown.

  1. Direct — no third-party cloud

    The app talks directly to your Home Assistant. Your URL and token never leave your Mac, and there's no account and no middleman service in between.

  2. Considerate — sleep/wake aware

    Polling pauses when the display sleeps and resumes on wake, so it isn't waking your machine or querying your instance while you're away.

  3. Current — updates itself

    The app checks for and installs new versions on its own. Releases are Apple-notarized, so they open without Gatekeeper warnings.

Requirements

What it needs to run.

macOS
13 Ventura or later
runs on the menu bar, no Dock icon
Mac
Apple Silicon or Intel
a universal, notarized build
Home Assistant
A running instance
with solar / battery sensors it can read

Download

Download it, then point it at your system.

A signed, notarized .app in a small zip. No installer, no account — and once it's running it keeps itself up to date on its own.

  1. Download & unzip

    Grab SolarWatcher.zip — it always points at the latest release — and unzip it.

  2. Move to Applications

    Drag SolarWatcher.app into your Applications folder.

  3. Launch

    Open it — it appears in the menu bar as a small ☀️. No Dock icon, no window.

  4. Connect

    Open its settings, paste your Home Assistant URL and long-lived access token, and map your sensor entities.

SolarWatcher.zip
# latest release
kind      macOS menu-bar app
arch      universal · Apple Silicon + Intel
✓ Apple-notarized — opens without warnings
✓ updates itself, built in
✓ reads directly from your Home Assistant
/releases/SolarWatcher.zip
Download for Mac
Your Home Assistant URL Long-lived access token

Private and local. SolarWatcher talks directly to your own Home Assistant — there's no third-party cloud, no account, and no middleman. Your URL and access token are kept on your Mac and stored nowhere else. Point it at your instance, and everything you see is read live from the sensors you already have.