Alarm Fatigue Isn’t a Software Problem. It’s an Industry One.

Alarms are supposed to make operations safer and more reliable. They exist to surface issues early, protect assets, and support the people responsible for keeping sites running.

Yet across solar and storage, many teams will quietly admit the same thing: they’re overwhelmed by them.

Modern sites are complex by design. Inverters, transformers, substations, sensors, SCADA platforms, monitoring tools. Each system generates alerts, often independently, often constantly. Hundreds a week has become normal. Sometimes more.

What’s less often discussed is what that volume does to the people on the receiving end.

When Everything Is Urgent, Nothing Is

Alarm overload doesn’t fail loudly. It fails subtly.

Operators don’t stop caring. They adapt. They scan instead of reading. They learn which alerts are usually harmless. They prioritise based on instinct rather than clarity. Over time, alarms stop signalling urgency and start blending into background noise.

This isn’t negligence. It’s human behaviour in a system that wasn’t designed with humans in mind.

The Numbers Behind the Noise

There’s a reason alarm overload keeps showing up across sites and portfolios.

Across UK, European, and international guidance including EEMUA 191, IEC 62682, and ISA-18.2, the message is consistent: alarm systems must be designed around human capability, not system capacity.

These standards suggest that operators can realistically manage around six alarms per hour, or roughly 150 alarms per day, without performance starting to degrade. Once alarm rates push beyond 300 per day, systems are considered overwhelming. Alarm “floods” (more than ten alarms in ten minutes) are treated as abnormal conditions, not something that should happen during normal operations.

Many solar and storage sites regularly exceed these thresholds, not because something has gone wrong, but because alarm strategies haven’t kept pace with growing complexity.

When environments consistently exceed human limits, tuning out isn’t carelessness. It’s a coping mechanism.

We’ve Normalised Noise

As an industry, we’ve become very good at adding monitoring and very bad at questioning its impact.

New assets bring new alerts. New platforms bring new dashboards. The assumption is that more visibility equals more control. In practice, visibility without structure often creates the opposite.

What’s rarely asked is a simple question:

Can someone realistically tell what matters, right now, in a few seconds?

If the answer is no, the system is already working against them.

Alarm Management Is About Decision-Making, Not Technology

The most effective alarm strategies aren’t the most complex. They’re the clearest.

Good alarm management supports fast, confident decisions under pressure. It makes urgency obvious. It reduces cognitive load. It respects the fact that people are managing multiple sites, multiple responsibilities, and often limited time.

At its best, it creates calm. Not silence, but focus.

At its worst, alarm chaos introduces stress, hesitation, and second-guessing, none of which belong in critical operations.

Why This Matters Now

Portfolios are growing. Teams aren’t scaling at the same rate. Expectations around uptime, safety, and compliance are only increasing.

In that environment, alarm fatigue isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s a systemic risk.

If we want resilient operations, we need to stop treating alarms as background noise and start treating them as part of the human system they sit within.

Because the goal isn’t more alarms. It’s better decisions, made faster, with confidence.

And that starts by admitting the problem exists.

KUDO Alarm Management Feature