Installed Sense Solar 2 days ago. Solar system is a leased 5 kw 25 panel enphase inverter system. Purchased Sense mainly to keep tabs on usage versus net meter KW surplus. We can heat our home with gas hot water baseboard or mini-split heat pumps. Usually our net surplus allows us to heat our home until December with heat pumps.
This year, went overboard with heating the garage (projects) and had my first electric bill in 7 years. Hopefully Sense will make me more aware of my net surplus and keep me from going over my net credit.
I was hoping that the Sense app had a way of keeping a running total, yearly, of usage versus solar generation. My anniversary date for net credit will be the end of this month. Is there some way to zero usage and production out at that point? This way I could see from that point forward my KW net credit building up with the utility.
Am sure others installed Sense for the same purpose. How are you folks setting up your Sense app to perform this function?
Another approach would be to use Sense export with Excel to accumulate Total Usage vs. Solar Production. Pretty easy to do with Pivot Tables. The most manual parts of the process would be filtering for the range you want, plus gluing multiple exported files together, since export range is fixed to calendar months and years.
A couple pointers in Excel - Use the Pivot Table function on the dowloaded daily usage file from Sense. Configure the Name field into the Pivot Table columns and remove all but the Total Usage and Solar Production entries.
Configure Months DateTime and DateTime into the Pivot Table rows. Sum the kWh field.
Then select one of the data entries in the new Pivot Table and go to the Value Field Settings form. From there you can choose to see the results in Running Total form. Here I have done it by month, but if you add a Billing Month field to the original downloaded spreadsheet, that coincides with your billing months, you can get a running total in custom billing months.
