One of my Solar CTs started acting up today

Technical Questions
1

Today was a clear day and I made just under 90 kWh according to the stats from my microinverter gateways. However, Sense showed only 77 kWh. The reason for this, I think, is that for the period between noon and 1pm, the 2nd Solar CT was either not reporting at all, or reporting way lower that the other one.

Here’s my power meter for today:

And here’s the report from my gateways:

Power curves from both arrays are nice and smooth around lunch time.

And here are some snapshots I took of from the Sense Status screen during the noon to 1pm window:

sensesolarCT-01.PNG1166×470 31.4 KB

sensesolarCT-02.PNG1154×466 32.5 KB

sensesolarCT-03.PNG1152×462 32.2 KB

And here’s one from a little after 1pm when everything was back to normal:

sensesolarCT-04.PNG1152×454 32.5 KB

And here’s a shot from after dark showing just the always on loads in the subpanel my inverters are connected to:

sensesolarCT-05.PNG1149×456 31 KB

So what gives? A bad solar CT, or some issue with the Sense unit itself?

2

Get in touch with tech support. This is either a bug (most likely I think) or at worst a failing ct. I lean towards bug because your usage is still being calculated correctly. I’ve seen it a couple times and the most recent time tech support went in and corrected a bug; they should know how to handle it. I have not seen it since they fixed it.

edit it did take a reset if I remember correctly.

3

I find this interesting as I have seen very similar graphs of my solar production and have always assumed it was clouds or other such issues. Further, even with those gaps my solar production as reported by sense is higher than what my meters show.

4

It may be the calculations are correct in the solar tally, but the real time readings are bugged?

1 Like
5

Thanks, I’ll contact tech support tomorrow.

One thing that is an odd coincidence is that the POCO came and swapped out my meter around 11 am today. Power was not disrupted since when the lever handle is raised to release the old meter, it creates a short across the socket so as to not disrupt the power.

Here’s the new meter at 0 kWh:

CVECmeter0kwh.JPG1280×634 146 KB

And here it is again just after sundown:

CVECmeter70kwh.JPG1280×699 162 KB

I guess these meters don’t have the ability to put a minus sign to the left of the number, lol.

It will probably be back to all zeros or close to it by tomorrow morning.

6

So this morning my meter was reading 110 kWh. I got a call into the POCO to find out what’s going on. Doesn’t seem right to me that this new meter is reading forward regardless of me producing more than I consume or not. Those 2 lines below the numbers moved right to left all day yesterday, and then switched to moving left to right at night when I consumed more than I used. I’m 99% sure the kWh reading on my old meter was decreasing anytime the lines moved right to left.

So far this morning the Solar CTs are tracking as I would expect.

If what I saw yesterday was a bug, and Sense support has identified root cause and pushed a fix out to others that have reported it, why would they not have done a global push to address this for everyone?

7

Can’t answer the global push question, but I will say that when I saw it, it would come and go. Fingers crossed, but keep your eyes open.

Edit - could be because it’s not a universal problem, and required a reset in my case?

8

Ok, so today one load and one solar CT appears to have lost it.

Here’s what my power graph looks like:

sense3-7-1.PNG2208×1242 342 KB

Nice, eh? Notice all the “fuzzies” as well?

And here’s the status screen:

sense3-7-2.PNG1242×2208 142 KB

This is a new phenomenon that just started today and as I type this, the CT readings are still zero on the “right” legs.

I enabled the new Network Detection feature yesterday, but I’m sure that is just a coincidence, right?

9

That’s sorta like what mine looked like when one of my cts gave out - but weird yours is both right legs?

We haven’t had any reading issues (outside of the norm), but our WiFi has been really slow to completely down over the past few days since I enabled… Hmm…

10

Yep both “right legs” are still out this morning. I have disabled network detection again, but so far that has not restored the right legs (not that I thought it would). Sent a message to support, hopefully I’ll get a response before the weekend. Right now my Sense is providing worthless data.

11

Just for grins, I went ahead and power cycled my Sense just now, after having disabled the Network Detection. That seems to have done the trick as all 4 CTs are now reporting. Guess I’ll stay away from Network Detection for now. Don’t see how they could be related, but that’s the only change I made recently…