AppsDaniel Riewe

macOS

Nova Power Logger

Illustration: red cap beside a laptop with a sun and green solar bars. Not a photograph.
Illustration, not a photograph.

Nova Power Logger is a small macOS menu-bar app (macOS 14 or later). It polls a solar inverter on the local network at regular intervals, shows the current power in watts in the menu bar and stores every reading locally on the Mac.

It builds on my shortcut “Nova power status” and runs without a Dock icon and without external dependencies.

No public source and no download: the repo is private.

Screenshots of the macOS app. In the settings, the address and location are covered.

“Verlauf” (history) window, day view: “Leistung heute” (power today) with a yield of 0.30 kWh, a peak of 505 W and 12 readings; an orange area chart that starts flat in the morning and climbs to 505 W around 09:49.
History: day view with power in watts
“Verlauf” (history) window, month view: October 2026 with a total of 22.7 kWh, 2.84 kWh per day on average, best day 4.6 kWh; a bar chart of daily yields with 7 October highlighted (3.70 kWh).
History: month view with daily yields
“Verlauf” (history) window, total view: total yield 1,334.4 kWh, best day 4.8 kWh, peak power 730 W; a rising yield curve since June 2026 with a short gap in August, with the CSV button beside it.
History: total since logging began
“Einstellungen” (settings) window: sections for the inverter (status URL covered, authorization masked), polling with an interval slider, night throttling with a night interval and a buffer around sunrise and sunset (latitude and longitude covered) and the “start at login” switch.
Settings (address and location covered)

What the menu bar shows

One click opens a dropdown with the current power, today's yield, a comparison with yesterday and the total yield. “Refresh now” polls immediately.

History and export

The history shows the stored readings for day, week, month, year or total, drawn with Swift Charts. The CSV export writes the readings of the period currently shown to a file.

Data and settings

Readings are stored locally in a SwiftData/SQLite database. The polling interval defaults to 5 minutes and can be set from 1 to 60 minutes. Night throttling polls less often when nothing is produced; optionally the app uses coordinates to compute sunrise and sunset offline. Launch at login is possible, and the credentials are kept in the Keychain.

The app only logs while the Mac is running and on the same network as the inverter.