New User Experience Shared

I just installed my Sense w/Solar bundle yesterday. Either I’ve done something incorrectly or there are some issues with my unit. Here is my experience so far:

After installing, it took 5 attempts to get the Solar calibration to work. My guess is that there is a 5 minute max wait period for the application to detect when the solar inverters are turned back on. This time limit might not be long enough. I was just about to give up and call support when it worked.

After a couple of hours of Sense monitoring and me having fun watching the power consumption bubbles, I was given the following error message: “D’oh! Sense identified a problem with your installation and it has been fixed automatically. The data collected so far has been deleted and we are re-checking your signals to make sure everything is working ok.” I really have no idea what this message means. Is this normal? Is this a problem?

A couple of times throughout the day, Sense reported that I was using no energy. Odd since I know I was. It was accurately reporting my solar production, but not my usage. Finally, after a few hours of this off and on usage reporting, the I received the following message: “Uh oh. Sense has detected an installation problem that we are unable to fix automatically. Sense support has been contacted and will be in touch.”

Looking at “Settings->My Home->Sense Monitor”, I can see the signals on “Mains”. They appear to be what I would consider appropriate energy usage, however they are negative. Maybe this is why Sense is reporting no energy usage?

And finally, when I woke up this morning, Sense was reporting as being offline. I tried to connect it to my WiFi, but the unit wouldn’t even connect to my app. So I reset the circuit breaker that Sense is connected to and it came back up and automatically connected to the WiFi.

I’m excited to use the potential that this product has to offer. Hopefully someone (support or a long time user) has some advice for me to get this working for me.

Thanks in advance.
Dale

As a longtime (relative) Sense user your experience is typical. Don’t believe there is any support on the weekends so Monday at the soonest. I run the app under the Android OS and have experienced exactly the same problem, reported it previously and speculate it may be a problem with the Android app. My thinking is that the app doesn’t recover correctly after it has been pushed into the OS background. This background recovery issue also seems to appear when you view the Now power timeline and cause the Sense app to be pulled from background, it often never catches up with real time graphing display, just the numeric values update, sometimes.
I have had better luck getting the unit going after a Solar calibration/restart by keeping the app active and in the foreground for the entire 5 minutes, but not always. After you start the Sense unit and turn your inverters back on keep the app alive on your screen for the next 5-6 minutes.

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I second @1agkirk2 experience. It’s been a long time since I had to calibrate - nearly 11mos now, but it was hit or miss and took me a few times.

I believe there is some level of automation on the Sense side for checking connections and making sure that your CTs are oriented correctly (and if not, correcting things internally), but it isn’t perfect.

When you’re able to get a hold of tech support, I’m sure they’ll be able to figure it out pretty quickly because yours certainly isn’t a rare occurrence, and the good news is that once it’s corrected it’s nearly smooth sailing for you afterwards.

Hang in there, it gets better (as long as you’re patient for appliance detection!). The ins and outs are worth the early hurdle.

Hey Dale,

Sorry you had issues getting up and running. If you’re still having issues or run into any others, reach out to our support team (https://help.sense.com/hc/requests/new) as they’ll best be able to help you out.

Thanks Ben. The support team at Sense has been great. They were able to
correct my negative main readings, and right now all is good.

Thanks for checking.
Dale

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Very happy to hear it!

Ben, can you share with me how to sign up for the Beta version of accessing my Sense data via a web browser?

Thanks
Dale