Router Down

My home Internet router died on Friday last week. My ISP (Verizon) said they would ship a replacement unit overnight. Four days later, it still had not shown up. 

What does this have to do with solar? I have a "Web box" that reads the solar production data from the inverter and sends it to the SMA server in Germany via my home network to display the nice charts you see if you click the image below "Solar Power Production" in the upper left-hand corner.  The Web Box can only store 4 days worth of data.

Since we were experiencing snowy weather, I thought that might be delaying the new router. So I called to get a tracking number. I got the tracking number only to find that it was not in the UPS system. Turns out that the Verizon customer support person I talked to had done everything needed to send the router except hit the final "approved" button. From here I was escalated to a "retention specialist" at Verizon. He send a technician out to hand deliver my replacement router first thing the next morning.

In the mean time, I looked in the web box manual and found that you can just stick a flash drive in the USB slot to add more storage. So I threw in an old drive and now have weeks worth of storage capacity.