I would hold off until you hear back from Support, since they have access to your monitor and will be able to advise you accordingly. If you don’t hear back with a satisfactory response, let me know so I can check in on your ticket.
In a typically set up Sense solar install, subtracting the Solar Production (3,964) from the Total Usage (house load - 10,836) will give you the Net Usage seen by a net meter at the interface to the grid. Batteries will complicate things since a battery is both a load and an energy source.
I hesitate to make a call on what your numbers mean for two reasons. I can’s see exactly what’s hooked up where, plus the Sense setup and calibration can adjust to 2 or 3 different scenarios. To be clear about my basic solar setup:
One pair of CTs monitor the mains as they enter my house (they meter net usage)
One pair of CTs monitor the solar backfeed where the inverter is connected to my main panel
In that setup Sense adds my Solar Production coming from the inverter into the main panel to the Net Usage coming from the mains, to show Total Usage for the house.
The challenge for you with this mode of Sense operation, is that you want to monitor your solar, but your Total Usage is Solar Production plus Battery Output plus Net Usage. In my mind, you need to treat the battery as part of the house load, and just focus on Solar Production and Total Usage, though you might have situations where Total Usage goes to zero because the battery is supplying the full house load.
Now, the usage CTs are the ones accounting for the actual home useage plus the solar production. This happens because the solar injection is in the same contacts of the load/backup inside my gateway 2.
I don’t know if Sense is capable of determining this eventually, just like it picks up the devices. If it can, it will even out by itself (maybe someone from Sense can confirm/deny this hypothesis?), if not, then I will need to invest in a panelboard for my gateway, and setup the solar injection over it.
Everyone, thank you so much. I really appreciate all the effort to help me and the patience.
I’m having the same problem here. Sense never detects when I disconnect the inverter (microinverters). It seems that 2 years later that the resolution to this issue frustratingly remains, “contact tech support”, to complete setup for a very common solar configuration. Can’t there be a step added in the setup that allows the user to select microinverters or “alternate configuration”?
@misc , as a fellow solar user, sorry that solar calibration is frustrating you. I don’t think that it’s as simple as you think to add more configurations, but do believe that a “fast lane” that helps solar users get setup, maybe even on weekends, might appropriate. Make sure you have sent your help request to support@sense.com, so hopefully thy can be on it on Monday.
I’d suggest that the sense solar setup produce a dialog box telling me to contact support@sense.com once it detects it is unable to calibrate solar and/or detects microinverters?
I wasted time trying to make this work, when it appears I was never going to be successful at attempting to do so multiple times.
I also find it very inconvenient to have to work through email to get things resolved. Is there a phone number for support and/or a live chat line ?
Today, my Sense system appears to have somewhat corrected itself after I did a solar calibration ‘for the heck of it’ as I wait for support via email and/or assistance via this forum.
While my Solar Production, Home Consumption & To the Grid numbers looked to have returned to ‘normal’, I still have a negative on my mains… correction… my mains are not negative at present:
Perhaps it’s because the Sun isn’t out right now?
While the panels were producing on Dec 22 it was negative on one of the Mains:
I think it was today as well during the day. I’ll have to check tomorrow for Mains values.
If I had someone available via chat, this would be a much faster process with tech support…
It appears support fixed the problem covertly. I have no idea what the problem was and what they did. Then they closed the ticket without telling me anything else. Arghhh.
Thank you for contacting Sense Support.
We apologize for this issue occurring!
We were able to remotely enable the solar monitoring for your system. You should see this reflected in the app now. If you are still on the solar setup screen, you should cancel out and power back on your inverter. This will not undo our changes.
If you still do not see the solar readings, simply cancel out of the app entirely and reopen it, or log out and log back in.
If you are still having any sort of issue, please let us know!
@rmbach,
The issue was that the automatic configuration failed or working configuration information (if the system was giving correct data for while) got borked. Support can fix the configuration remotely - configuration includes information like the polarity of the current going through each CT, plus the L1/L2 matchup between solar and mains CTs.
I had the same issue this morning.
I tried around 5 times but the last one I changed the procedure to the following.
Start the Solar registration and when the app asks you to turn the inverters off, take a note at the production seen, should be larger than 150 W.
Proceed to turn your inverters off… in my case I switched off the breaker where the solar production comes in to my electrical panel.
The production reading went to 1W and the app detected the inverters were “turned off” and asked for turning them back on again, but this time I waited for a whole minute and then flipped the breaker on.
It took few minutes to detect my solar system but it did.
I think there is a timing issue and if you turn it off and turn it on immediately after it detected it was off… it gets stuck.
Give it time and let everyone know if you tried this and worked for you. If that is the case, then Sense should add deep dive in the issue, and either improve the documentation or modify the app consider the latency.
