I installed Saturday, it went thru the calibration for about a day and a half. Then it said it found a problem, showed 50% check back in a couple hours. That was a day and a half ago. How long should i wait? Power is good, all connections are good was installed by a master electirican (myslef).
With solar CTs or without ?
Without, I bought them with plans of adding solar later
Brian
Without solar, the process should be quicker. The FAQ suggest that if signal check takes more than 48hrs you should call support. My experience is that it can take 24 hours to get through.
I contacted support on the site this morning but they are out until the 26th (24 and 25). And the fact that getting a post on here is worse than pulling teeth to even get community support does not make me confident in my purchase.
It has now been almost 2 days since the āproblemā was found.
Things that could help any new person:
1 - Information on what the issues are, not just a vague blurn.
2 - Having a good single document that actually covers what is happening during the setup would be better than trying to find the bits and pieces spread all over.
3 - Being able to post to the communuity without having to be approved, that alone makes the community very poor for any possible support.
My understanding of what the signals check does is about checking polarity and phase for the Sense.
So Black wire on Sense is on the same Phase as CT Clamp A, and it seems CT Clamp A is facing the power source.
Or whatever combination above above. Sometimes the signal check can fix itself. Othertimes it needs human (support) intervention. Since support is closed for 2 days, I would say open up your panel and double check that the clamps are closed and facing the same direction. Also make sure that there is no way one of the clamps is getting opened when you put the panel cover back on.
Then perform a reset on the device and have it start the signal check over again.
You can do this in the app by going to Settings / My Home / Sense Monitor and scroll to the bottom to factory reset.
As for the forum needing approval. While annoying, I can understand it. Iāve been on plenty of forums where registration is open and the bots / trolls / spam gets out of hand. By validating that users on the forums are also Sense users does increase the quality of the posts. Or at least I think it does. Maybe Sense is controlling access for another reason.
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@brian4, I think you should be able to post immediately now that you have a couple of posts under your belt. As a fellow user, I canāt tell you much more about signal check, except that there are other threads on the forum where signal check was impeded by either one or more slightly open CTs or by a user moving around CTs during signal check.
Whatās happening during signal check ? Extrapolating from the FAQ answer, Sense is sampling both the current going through the CTs and the voltages on the 240V breaker at high sample rate (up to 1M samples per second). Sense tries to match the voltage on each leg to the corresponding currents on each of the two legs. Plus it has to deal with the cases where users might have accidentally reversed CT orientations between the two legs. My guess is that Sense tries to find periods of time when the RMS currents on the CTS are changing very little (the house load not changing - AC current is somewhat close to a nice sine wave). Maybe it even looks for situations when the current is very close to a sine wave for a few cycles. With that data and matching data on the voltage side, Sense could do a polarity check. But Sense also needs to correlate voltage with current. They probably look for slight variances in AC voltages on the mains when there are big spikes in one of the CTs.
Happy Holidays to all, and to all a good night !
I have quadruple checked and it is all correct. I did this myself but I am also a master electrician. CTs are not open or binding, both have flow in same direction, the power connections are on a 220 volt double pole breaker (separate phases). This is how it was from the begining.
It is reading the consumption on both phases (need to balance it better but that is not an issue with this). It is showing on all time and other but has the error still listed.
If better information or should i say some information other than āa pronlem was foundā would be extremely informative.Also access to any logs it produces so issues can be seen.
As for the forum, as I purchased directly from them that should never have been an issue, and if they are not providing proper documentation and support (email and wait is not proper support) then the forums should be open and accessible to anyone who needs assistance.
Restarting now is not good as the times they provide and no where in the ball park of real times. I will wait until i talk with them tomorrow and then see what they say even though i have little hope of help from what i have found in the last 3 days.
Well it just now completed. I still want to know why it took almost 2.5 days to āresolveā the problem and what it was.
@brian4,
Good to hear that signal check has completed ! Given that you are a master electrician, you probably do your work in a highly structured and careful way to make sure all wiring conventions/codes are followed so that all work is correct and traceable. You may find Sense a bit frustrating going forward for a couple of reasons:
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It is designed to sort out messy and unstructured data, even from installs and households that are not wired completely to the letter of the code.
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Since it uses machine learning to do much of its testing and device detection, it is virtually impossible to explain some of its āanswersā or why it misses something. There are some forms of machine learning / data science that offer some traceability, but the the advanced stuff Sense is doing doesnāt really give a diagnostic view of why or why not.
As an electrical engineer, I feel some of the same sentiments as you - why did Sense say/do that ? But I find that Iām much happier with Sense if I donāt try to to look for ulterior insights when there are none, and rather just look at the data it produces and try to figure out how I might do signal checks and detection based on the limited information that Sense has to work with.
You will soon have plenty of data to work with via the power meter, with detections to follow, given a little patience. And if you want to learn more about the technology, read the technology blogsā¦
I am also a software programmer (by trade now) and hobbyist electrical/hardware engineer so I understand pretty much all of it. The electrician part had no issues with the install or the connections, all made sense. The software programmer while not up on the machine learning (AI etc) i understand the basics but the errors should be useful and ex-planatory which they are not. What have a big issue with as it is poor coding (weather software or firmware) and that annoys the heck out of me.
So far it has found my fridge (compressor only i think so far) which is a start.
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I donāt think all āunspecifiedā errors are a result of bad coding. When some numeric methods fail, the error message often tells the user little or nothing, so exposing the error message wouldnāt help improve a consumer product.
Some of the best coders in the world have had a go at enhancing the SPICE circuit simulator since 1973, and it still frequently spews out informative messages like āNo convergence achieved with the minimum time step specifiedā, or āGmin/Source Stepping Failedā. The messages clearly describe what went wrong in the numeric method, but are not at all prescriptive about what the culprit is in the circuit under simulation. Fortunately, itās not a consumer product like Sense.
I could see the Sense signal check similarly falling victim to singularities and associated numerical instabilitiesā¦
Iām experiencing a very similar issue. Just commenting to get reply notifications.
Instead, I would suggest you reach out directly to the Support team if it has been longer than 48 hours. https://sense.com/contact
I submitted a request several days ago. With the holiday, Iād expect a delay.
Weāre investigating an issue where signal check is taking longer for new installs. Follow this thread for updates: FIX ISSUED: Signal Check taking longer than 48h for some users
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