Solar irrigation systems are increasingly deployed in rural regions, yet their distributed and remote deployment makes maintenance challenging for farmers. While formal monitoring processes and applications exist, they often fall short in practice. We present insights from grid-connected solar irrigation schemes that incentivize farmers to feed energy to the grid, focusing on how farmers maintain their systems. We found that farmers face multiple challenges but are also devising strategies, including the appropriation of WhatsApp to share daily generation data with peers and compare performance across installations to identify potential system anomalies. Our findings highlight how messaging platforms function as informal digital infrastructures enabling collective sensemaking around distributed energy systems. We discuss implications for designing agricultural energy technologies that support peer comparison, contextual interpretation, and community-driven maintenance, framing these as a socio-technical platform. Finally, we outline directions for future work integrating such practices with formal monitoring tools and explore their potential to support citizen science initiatives in environmental sensing.

翻译：太阳能灌溉系统在农村地区日益普及，但其分散式远程部署为农民的维护工作带来挑战。尽管存在正式监控流程与应用，实践中往往收效甚微。我们通过分析并网型太阳能灌溉方案（该方案激励农民向电网输送能源）获得重要见解，重点关注农民如何维护其系统。研究发现农民面临多重挑战，同时也正在制定应对策略，包括利用WhatsApp与同行共享每日发电数据，并通过跨设备性能对比识别潜在系统异常。我们的发现揭示了即时通讯平台如何作为非正式数字基础设施，支撑分布式能源系统的集体认知构建。本文探讨了设计支持同行比较、情境化解读与社区驱动维护的农业能源技术的启示，并将这些要素界定为社会技术平台。最后，我们概述了将此类实践与正式监控工具相结合的未来研究方向，并探索其在环境感知领域支持公民科学倡议的潜力。