Solar Cancelling out Consumption

I havent moved them yet because I have to relocate the IPCs to make room for the ICs and that house is filled with airbnb guests right now. I will follow up.

You should see positive numbers for both solar production and consumption from both the mains and solar. The only time you should see negative values is at night when your inverters are in a standby state. Here is a screenshot from my system just a few minutes ago.

I have my primary CT’s connected to the feeds coming into my main breaker panel. My solar is fed into my main panel via a single 80 amp breaker. The solar has its own sub panel where my two inverters are terminated with a 40 amp breaker in the solar sub panel. I connect the solar CT’s in the main panel to the 80 amp breaker. It looks like this diagram

image

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@jstewart0131 you might want to modify that image and remove your email address

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Good call, fixed that

Relocated the CTs this morning and its looking better but need to give it a day or two. No sun.


Yellow scribble is previous location. I had to raise the left IPC up about 1/8".


Red scribble is when I changed the location

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Nah theres still something not right. The sense monitor is now saying I’m using way more power than normal. It appears as it’s still just displaying the summation of the production and the consumption. I went as far as shutting off my inverters to double check this. With the inverters shut off, I’m only using about 700W right now. When I turn the inverters on, its saying I’m using 5.3kW. If I check L1 and L2, they shoot up to a roughly even split of the total power consumption. I verified this all with my clamp meter. I’m throwing in the towel and calling sense support today, but I still stand by my word in that its a freakin terrible business and support model for solar customers to have to call in on a subscription free service.

Must be nice to have working device detection. How’d you pull that off? :smiley:

Well first of all, I might have contributed to the frustration by suggesting the move of the CTs. While maybe it’s correct for my installation and a generator I’ve since learned that solar is a different beast with the Sense monitor.

I have also learned that this is something that tech support has to deal with to get the numbers correct as many people have solar installed in different ways. For example, my utility doesn’t allow back feeding to the grid.

While it’s frustrating to have to contact support sometimes, my experience with them has been pleasant. Also, there’s no number you can call, you have to file a support ticket.

Again, my apologies for offering a suggestion that didn’t work in your scenario.

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A good number of those devices are from two (2) HS-300 Power strips. I have a good number of successful native detections. Oven, microwave, dishwasher (partially), electric dryer, HVAC, Tesla EV’s (both Model 3 and Model Y are detected as the same device which is fine), 1 of 2 refrigerators, and a toaster.

Man, I wish I shared that sentiment, but the current support meta is just infuriating to me. You either get robots, Indian call centers with robot answers, or the worst - either no offer or a deeply hidden offer of verbal connectivity (which happens to be what Sense offers).

That must be nice, really. Most of my devices are usually stuffed into always on and other. Hell, one of the burners on my stove is split between always on and stove >.< I tried to be attentive but theres only so much you can do. Even my Model X getting charged by a Tesla Wall Connector gets stuffed into other. I wish you could just go in and add devices or manual nameplate info of devices you KNOW are on your system.

This is a separate discussion though so I’ll just leave it at that to keep from confusion and clutter. :slight_smile:

Man, this is what I’m talking about. Some dude named Tejaswi marked my e-ticket as “Solved”.

Yet meanwhile:


It is NOT solved.

They offer a “Reopen” button on the ticket:

and when you hit it, all it does is take you to a page with 1 button that doesn’t do anything:

I’m escalating this to our lead Support agent @addohm - we’re trialing an additional Support system to help with some of the day-to-day volume our Support team experiences. This type of feedback is helpful, thank you.

For reference, this re-opens the ticket on our back-end system (I can confirm that your ticket is reopened.) I agree that there could be a better confirmation notification once a ticket is reopened.

It didn’t reopen the ticket (either of them) from my side. I ctrl+F5’d the list to be sure.

You mean outsourcing to India support centers? Aren’t you guys an American company? Thought you were in Massachusetts. On behalf of most Americans, we don’t like dealing with Indian call\support centers over the phone, let alone over the internet. Might be cheaper for you but the support you get from these “systems” is terrible. Id rather call a 1-800 number and wait in line for an hour to talk to someone at the home office.

Also, I hope your company is aware that the majority of phone scamming in the US comes from India and preys on the elderly.

Finally…

I MUST reiterate my point in that customers should not have to deal with this, at all. Customers should not have to talk to support to get changes made and not have to come to these forums for software issues. This isn’t a kickstarter. I am willing to bet that whatever change they made was an easy change. For example: add to the solar options (solar adding to consumption? [yes] [no]). Yes does the math change, no does nothing.

I can understand the frustration here, but this is definitely an over-generalized statement. I think you could have more tactfully addressed your frustrations and achieved getting your point across without bringing ethnicity up or stating your opinion like it’s representative of everyone here (or, as you mentioned, “on behalf of most Americans”.)

There are a few points to address here, namely that it would be cheaper to have outsourced our entire Support team than hire the technical Support staff that we have in office. We did not. As we’re growing, we have to test and trial bringing our Support team to scale to effectively respond to users in a timely manner. That certainly comes with some hiccups, which we’re actively addressing and incorporating into our Support procedures. While it’s not a valid excuse for missing the mark with your case, I hope that makes the situation more understandable. If you are having an issue with Support, tagging me here (as you did) or reaching out via private message is always an option.

There are a variety of reasons we don’t have a phone number available. I’ve shared those below.

As several Sense users can attest to, we do offer scheduled phone support for issues that cannot be fixed with our troubleshooting steps. It’s not very common, and there are a few reasons why we do not offer phone support as a default customer support contact option.

Most Support requests require logs and research that would be extremely time-consuming for customers/users to convey. We can access all of this information directly via the Support ticket, saving users a ton of time and allowing us to get back to users in a timely fashion.

Due to the size of our team, we would not be able to handle the volume of open phone support - keep in mind that a large percentage of incoming tickets are from people that haven’t bought Sense yet and are wondering if it’s compatible with their electrical panel. That’s all handled by our Support team.

We have also spent a lot of time building knowledge base resources for some of our most common support requests issues over at help.sense.com. Often (but not always), Support requests can be answered by an existing resource on help.sense.com or with the help of the Solvvy chatbot. A phone support line would not allow users the opportunity to answer their own questions, as Solvvy currently does.

Last (but not least) is privacy - we’re not able to confirm the person calling or able to verify their account.

With all of these factors at play, we’re able to actually be of more assistance with this structure.

I just spoke with Support and this was an error with your channel maps (not a typical set-up issue) which caused the confusion on the ticket. Since this was an actual error, it took us a bit to identify the cause. Apologies for the wait and any inconvenience on your end.

As you noted, this should be fixed within the next hour (if not already).

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Yes, they did fix it.

Now…on to getting a public API :smiley:

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While it’s not “public” just do a quick search on GitHub and you’ll see it’s fairly simple to query for data.