Solar always showing 4W power when no solar is being produced

I installed Sense last week and I’m still getting used to it - but so far I love it.

During the day, Sense appears to properly indicate the amount of solar my panels are producing. From sunset to sunrise, Sense indicates that my solar is producing 4W power consistently when there’s absolutely no light - except possibly a street light that’s some distance away. Is there a way I can re-calibrate this to remove the 4W power that I’m quite certain my solar panels are not producing all night long?

I believe you should actually see a slightly negative watt value at night. I have two SolarEdgeHD 7.6kW inverters for my solar setup and I see -4 to -6 watts when the inverters go into standby mode at night. This is consistent with the spec sheet of the inverters which list a power usage of 2.5 watts when in standby.

This may just be a calibration accuracy issue when you setup the solar monitoring.

You could try to re-calibrate, but there’s always going to be a little bit of inaccuracy. As @JeffEngland suggests, my solar inverter, a SolarEdge, reads like -3W on Sense at night, and that actually might be a reasonable reading because inverters do suck down a little power, even when they are in night mode.

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Thanks for confirming. I too was expecting a low amount of wattage draw for the inverter. My solar setup is Tesla and the specs indicate similar standby mode at night. During standby, is when i see a consistent +4W. This morning I watched it fluctuate between -12W to -1W for <5 minutes as it came of standby. It’s so close to what is expected and I wouldn’t even worry about it at this point, but now the “curiosity bug” has struck I’ll likely check out how to re-calibrate and see how that goes.

@jstewart0131 and @kevin1 - thanks for the confirmation and help. I’m impressed with the amount of information this forum provides.

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I have a a 9.81kW 30 panel setup with 30 micro inverters set up a month ago… as soon as sun sets my solar production drops to 4 watts constant also. In my case if you go to the signals list under settings, my solar legs are -1w and 5w respectively, hence the net 4 watt.

Hey @JeffEngland
Dropping a link to another thread about this topic.
Short version is that unless you are experiencing something different (always possible), Sense is aware of this and its on a list to try to solve.

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If you have not sorted this out yet, you might want to double check the wiring around where you have your solar clamps installed. Any other power carrying conductors too close and in the right orientation to your solar clamps could induce some false readings.

Another newbie here. It’s the same on my end. 6.555 kW system with 19 panels and 19 microinverters. When the sun goes down, I show -1w and 5w on my solar legs, netting 4w.

I’m not concerned about it as the system seems to be working just fine.

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While I’m not working with solar I did confirm my theory above today. I had my panel open working on something else and I experimented with one of my dedicated circuit CT’s. I had it clamped to a breaker I know to have been carrying 0.0 amps / 0 watts and the CT was getting a reading of 4-5 watts. The wire between the CT and the Sense module was running parallel with some other wires and the CT itself was leaning against some other wires. By moving the CT and its wire around/away from other wires I could watch the watts change to 0-1 if I held everything in the correct spot. My panel is very crowded so it seems it may be impossible to completely eliminate these rouge watt readings, perhaps some of you with more open panels could clean them up.

I’m seeing the same thing. Just turned on my solar today for the first time. I already has Sense setup for solar as I had to contact support to change from Dedicated Circuit Monitoring. It was showing correct data off the bat.

I went ahead and tried the solar calibration and it worked as expected during the process, but changed from positive consumption and solar to the second leg of each being negative numbers. Tried calibration again but it wouldn’t detect the inverter being off, so had to cancel calibration and it went back to all positive numbers that seem to make sense.

Now that the sun is down, I’m still showing positive 3-5w for solar spread over each leg. I’m using Enphase microinverters and was expecting to see a small negative value as it is only consuming electricity on that breaker at this point.

Sounds like it is a bug with Sense that will be addressed, or should I try calibration again?

I would suggest trying solar calibration one more time. From my experiences, solar calibration can be a little tricky, especially the off step, so if you can’t get through, you should contact support@sense.com. They can help you get through.

Still did not detect the Off state of the inverter, so I’ll have to wait to hear from Support.

I would expect to see nothing from the app on the solar side when in standby, but certainly not a positive number. My inverters how a negative number that is quantified with the over all grid number feeding the home and the solar. If you see a positive small number that is feeding the home at night try flipping the solar CTs around. That worked for me.

After restarting my phone and trying calibration again, I noticed that as it was going through the setup, the current solar numbers were updating, where before they did not. It properly detected shutting off the inverter and calibration succeeded without messing up the numbers, but I still see 3W overnight.

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