I completed my initial install of Sense (with solar) a little over a week ago. I went through the solar setup procedure as directed by the application: turn inverters off, turn inverters on. After the install Sense showed negative values in Sense Montitor → Mains which correspond to the amount being pushed to the utility solar production exceeding house consumption. The home consumption on the Now and Meter pages showed 0.
I reached out to support, and they corrected “a small configuration issue” and “pushed out a fix”. Following this, Mains showed positive numbers, and the home consumption showed as it should. Unfortunately, support wasn’t able to correct the prior data, so I ended up with a bunch of bad data. Support indicated that I should be able to do a data reset, and “Sense should be able to get the configuration in the right place on its own.”
So this morning, I did a data reset to clear all the bad data. Unfortunately, Sense went right back to negative values on Mains and 0 for home consumption. I’ve reached out to support again to hopefully fix the configuration again before I end up with a bunch more bad data and need to repeat the process again.
So my question… is there something I could have done wrong in set up? Is there something that I can do to prevent this if I have to reset again? The electrician rechecked the CTs, and they are facing the right direction with the arrows (and labels) conforming to current flow.
Appreciate any advice anyone has to offer. Thanks.
Sense tries to auto configure for all the possible variations of L1, L2 and CT orientations - match the L1 and L2 legs between mains and solar, plus make all polarities / orientations match, but sometimes it just can’t get it right. Sense support can readjust and fix all of these from the mothership. My 2c - don’t worry about the “bad data” next time - it’s going to be old history after a few months.
Worth a try. But from what I have seen on the forum (and twice out of 5 times in setting up my solar Sense), most of the issues crop up in the solar setup / calibration process, that one still needs to go through, even with an incremental add-on.
I briefly had a similar issue after moving my Sense to a new breaker switch. The fix for me was flipping the positioning of the red and black power wires on the breaker switch.
I did make a couple more reset attempts. The most interesting one, was with disabling the solar completely and attempting to let Sense get comfortable with the house before adding solar the next day. Sense initialized as you would expect, and had the correct values for mains. I thought it was going to work…, but about 6 hours into the process Sense decided to reverse the mains, showing them as negative values. Sense said that it had determined that there was a problem with the install and was reaching out to Sense Support. It would be interesting to try to understand this, but I’m going to let it go. Support did their thing (thanks Zach!) early this morning and things are now as they should be.
I’m left with a small amount data, 6 hours, which I will live with. Much better than the 5 days I had previously. I’m not going to attempt another reset for sure.
Glad that Zach was able to help - he’s great. I often recommend reaching out to Support when these types of issues arise with negative values. These types of installation issues are usually a relatively simple fix on our end.
