Can solar power run remote IoT monitoring?

Why solar is the obvious answer for remote sites

Boreholes, reservoirs, river gauges, weather stations, remote tanks and paddock sensors share a problem: they're where you need data but where grid power is far away, expensive to bring in, or simply absent. Trenching a cable to a remote borehole can cost more than the entire monitoring system. And where there is grid power, load shedding takes it away on a schedule.

Solar sidesteps both. At the power levels a monitoring node needs, you're not running a pump or a building — just a little electronics — and the sun delivers that almost anywhere in South Africa, a country with a high solar resource. No connection fee, no cable, no power bill, no load-shedding gap.

What a solar monitoring node contains

• Low-power sensors — level, flow, pressure, soil-moisture, weather — chosen to sleep between readings.
• An edge device that wakes, reads, buffers and transmits, then sleeps again to save power.
• A long-range, low-power radio — LoRaWAN — which sends small data packets over kilometres on minimal energy (see our connectivity guide).
• A solar panel and battery sized for the node and the local sun.

How to size it (so it survives cloudy weeks)

1. Estimate daily energy use. Add up what the node consumes per day — mostly driven by how often it reads and transmits. Reporting every 15 minutes uses far more than every few hours; match the interval to what the decision actually needs.
2. Size the battery for autonomy. Choose a battery that can run the node for several days with no sun — enough to ride out a cloudy spell. Days of autonomy, not hours, is what makes a remote node reliable.
3. Size the panel for the worst day, not the best. The panel must fully recharge the battery on a short, overcast winter day, not just a bright summer one. Sizing to the best case is the classic mistake that leaves a node dead in July.
4. Add margin and the right battery chemistry. Allow headroom for ageing and dust on the panel, and pick a battery suited to outdoor temperature swings.
5. Buffer data at the edge. If the radio link drops, the node stores readings and forwards them when it reconnects — so a connectivity gap never becomes a data gap (the same principle in our load-shedding guide).

The discipline is simple: size for the worst week, not the average. A node sized to survive a cloudy winter spell will run for years; one sized to summer averages will fail exactly when the weather turns.

What it unlocks

Off-grid solar monitoring turns places you previously visited in person into places that report themselves. A borehole that texts you its water level and pump status. A reservoir that alerts on a sudden drop. A weather station that feeds your irrigation scheduling. A remote tank you no longer drive out to check. Fewer site visits, faster response, and a continuous record — with no grid and no Eskom dependency.

This is how addanode powers remote sensing across our water, irrigation and livestock solutions on one addaNet platform. Because we build both the hardware and the software in-house and support it locally, we size the solar, battery and reporting interval together for your site and your sun — so a remote node reports reliably for years, engineered for South African conditions rather than guessed at.

Frequently asked questions

Primary sources

• Eskom — Load shedding schedule interpretation (stages 1–8, 2-hour/4-hour blocks, +30 min switching)
• LoRa Alliance — About LoRaWAN (open LPWAN standard)
• Eskom — Media statement, 21 Aug 2026: 462 consecutive days without load shedding; load reduction schedule