I just received my first bill since installing my Sense. I have a spreadsheet where I entered every hourly, daily, weekly reading from Sense. I compared the reads with my utility and find my Sense to be extremely accurate. I was billed for 746 kWh and Sense calculated 744.7 kWh. That’s 99.83% accurate. I love it.
Thanks to the new Sense export capabilities I was able to do an hour-by-hour accuracy analysis of Sense since the start of 2018. It looks really good. I can pretty much count on it being within 2% of my net meter reading. Just watch out for the hours when the monitor is offline due to networking issue. Details here:
I have seen various tidbits around the web that suggest that SolarEdge’s are very accurate with respect to instantaneous power measurements, but run a little high when looking at energy calculations.
Way back when, I was comparing my SolarEdge, with my meter, with Sense. At the time, the SolarEdge inverter was reporting 3% higher than my meter, which was reporting 3% higher than Sense. That’s how we first identified the “Daytime Dip,” which was eventually tracked down to a faulty calibration process and a fix was sent out to all units.
Since then, my solar has been more or less spot on with my meter, while my SolarEdge is…still 3% higher than my meter. Gee, why would an inverter company want you to believe you were making more energy than you actually were? Alternatively, why would a utility want you to believe you were making less energy than you actually were?
I can spot an easy 1% difference between the inverter and Sense in voltage readings. When my SolarEdge reads 245.3V, I see only 121.2 and 121.4 (242.6V total) on my mains. Voltage readings, even AC should be pretty close to spot on, so I attribute that to the voltage drop between the SolarEdge measurement point and the Sense breaker.
I notice your Sense monitor was clipping the bottom (Assume Solar). You might check out the Beta group and the release they have for the meter. It displays the full range (including negative). You must request access to the Beta version.
Of course not me as im just a lurker.
Check out Support@sense.com if interested.
Thanks Carol,
The only time my Sense data has gone negative and was clipped below zero, as you describe, was when I had some weird Sense monitor problems in the past that have actually caused negative Total Usage and Solar Production. But when everything is working fine, all the traces are positive in the graph (solar is really negative energy usage but it shows positive in Sense). The negative-going part of the Rainforest Automation “Demand” graph reflects my net usage (Total Usage minus Solar), not the same as Sense’s “Total Usage”.
I’ll use your suggestion if I see negative clipping again - I would be helpful.
I get negative a lot. That’s because I have several things connected to the same panel that is on my solar sub panel. When my car is charging at night I get a negative number.
Carol:grinning:
I wondered the same about the “Totals” accuracy and they don’t
seem to match everywhere.
But I’ll show you where I think it does a fairly good job. It’s
the “Trends” page and specifically the “Usage” stats.
I’m attaching my usage from this page for yesterday and also the
text message I got from the power company this morning showing
yesterdays usage.
Sense put it at 136
power company at 144
That’s a difference of 8 KWH. My price for electricity is $0.085
per KWH.
I think that’s pretty close and is a 68 cent difference on a day when
we had below zero temps and usage was extremely high.