I have 400 amp split service currently being monitored by sense and have solar being installed soon. Since there is still no solution to get it all on one sense account I’m considering just adding a second sense unit for monitoring only solar production. Can a sense unit work with no usage CT’s hooked up? At this point I figure I can just monitor production on a separate account and then hope that someday there will be a way to merge the two units to properly show on one account.
Any hope of putting your Mains CTs on your pre-split (pre-meter) 400A lines ? I had to open up my meter box to do that, but I have a working 400A Sense with solar. For me, the house power never exceeds 40kW, so current never gets close to 200A (much of the high wattage usage is 240V). I think there are a few others in the community who have done similar.
If you do go with a second Sense, I think you can just install on the solar back feeds as if they are the mains. One problem you will have after you install solar is that your original CTs will only see net usage, so Sense will no longer show or tally Total Usage (with Sense Solar , Sense adds mains + solar). Splitting out solar also makes things more tricky for device monitoring - things like Always On, Other, and even device % won’t make sense since Sense is seeing Net Usage as Total Usage, and can go negative. Plus the Solar dashboard give meaningful data for either monitor. Lots of reasons to try to squeeze your 400A service into one monitor if possible.
But if you have to split the measurements, you can set up Home Assistant to collect data from both Sense monitors and display and track combined results:
Home Assistant has recently added a dedicated Energy Management module so you can use the Sense monitors as just basic sensors and use the features and configurability of Home Assistant to display similar dashboards.
Kevin,
Thank you for you response. I have looked into trying to do that but the CT clamps were just too small to be able to make it work. So yes I was just going to add another (would be my third) sense account. That is a good point about net usage. I guess I will have to see how everything is getting wired in to the panels when the solar is installed so I can try to keep my usage figures accurate somehow. Really wish there was an option to get larger CT’s on the sense unit as I also cant see myself maxing them out ever.
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