How to Set Up Ticket and Preventive Round Records for Solar Plants

Faults reach an O&M desk in three ways. A monitoring portal raises an alarm, an owner phones, or an engineer finds the problem on a round. Only the first is written down anywhere.

Give all three the same ticket. It names the plant, the equipment, the time reported, the engineer assigned and the cause found. A ticket closes only when a cause and a fix are noted.

This is the record an owner’s query is answered from. Over a few months the same record also shows which plants raise the most calls, which equipment fails most often, and which engineers close tickets with a cause noted.

Each plant has its own contract. Response time, cleaning frequency, the committed generation level and the spares included can all differ. An engineer on the road, with a call waiting and a plant forty kilometres away, rarely remembers which terms apply.

Put the terms on the plant record, in a short list the ticket screen can show. The engineer then sees the response expected before the call is accepted.

Where a term is unclear, ask the owner and write the answer down. A disputed month is easier to settle with a dated note.

A round is more than a visit. It covers modules, strings, inverters, cables, earthing and structures, and each item has a reading or a finding. A paper sheet photographed later loses detail.

Fill the checklist on a phone at the plant, with photos attached to the item they show. Cleaning is logged by block or array, so the supervisor sees which area was missed.

Plan the calendar by season. Dust and rain change how often a site needs cleaning, and the schedule should be edited without losing last year’s record.

Fuses, connectors, surge protection devices and cable ties travel in vehicles. A part issued to an engineer and never booked to a plant is a cost nobody sees.

Record each issue with the part, the engineer and the ticket. When a part is fitted, the plant record shows it. Warranty dates by serial sit beside it for any inverter or module claim.

The monthly report usually holds generation, performance ratio, availability, tickets raised and closed, and cleaning done. Tickets and rounds already hold three of those.

Generation figures come from the inverter portals or loggers. Whether those can be read automatically depends on the make, and some makes do not open their data. Until a link is confirmed, load the figures as a file.

Check the first few reports against the old ones, line by line, with the engineer who used to build them. Differences show where a field is missing.