Turned on solar, now no other devices recognized... will they come back?

We bought our Sense about 2 months ago with support for solar. Today, we finally got our solar panels installed and turned on! Sense is doing a great job monitoring the panels, but it seems to have lost everything else! In the past few months, it had learned about two dozen devices, but now all we have is “Solar” and “Other”.

My question is, with the very different energy profile now that solar is on, will Sense realize there are devices in the house it already knows and reassociate, or would it be better to “take it up to Anchorhead and have its memory erased,” and let it start completely over?

Hey there @robert_nickel. This isn’t typical, devices pre-solar should still be visible along with historical usage. Can you give us permission to take a look at your monitor? From there, I can let you know what the best next step is.

I also added solar much later, and doing so had absolutely no effect on the devices Sense had already learned (only 13 out of our 173) and made further detection neither worst or better than before solar. I suspect that during the solar project your wiring may have been shifted around somewhat, including swapping phases (really bad for Sense!). Electricians, and in particular those doing solar installs, are pretty much oblivious about monitoring systems and Sense is MUCH fussier than most…if not all…of the competing systems. My welserver, for example, is hardly affected by wiring panel, power meter wiring, etc, changes, but Sense is sensitive to most changes.

BTW, Sense does closely match both the Enphase (Solar micro-inverters) monitoring and my welserver monitoring…both of which measure within 1% of each other. Sense s within a couple of %…slightly low.

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Thanks Justin, go ahead. The devices still show in my device list, but Sense’s notion of what’s on or off is all messed up. Since we activated the solar, Sense says we’ve used our coffee frother, dishwasher, and dehumidifier, but all three have been off all day. Meanwhile, a fridge that Sense has previously recognized easily, it is showing a very odd pattern and mostly not detecting. (I’ll try to include a screen capture.)

Ah, thank you for clarifying the issue @robert_nickel.

Did you (or an installer) remove/replace the main sensors at all during the upgrade to Solar? Based on what you’re seeing, it sounds like they may have accidentally been swapped them when you put them back on.

I’m going to relay this, but still recommend you submit a ticket to support (support@sense.com) so we can document this issue. Go ahead and direct message me the ticket # here once you submit your ticket!

Hi Justin, and thanks for the continued help. I gave it a few days to see if Sense would get its head straight, but situation is unchanged, so I went ahead and sent a note to support.

It is unlikely that any work was done in the electrical panel, as we’d had all that work done months ago at the time Sense was installed. The only piece that had been delayed was the actual installation of the panels on the roof (we needed a new roof first), so that final piece is all that happened this week. I think all that was done in the panel was to flip the solar circuit breakers on and off as needed.

I will DM you the support ticket number once I have it.

“Flipping the breakers” to your solar shouldn’t have affected Sense’s device monitoring, just added solar to the mix. So I still suspect something else happened in the process.

UPDATE: We had the original electrician who, two months ago, was the installer of our Sense system come out today and inspect. He confirmed exactly what the solar installers had said, which is that nothing has been physically moved within the circuit box. It is still all physically connected exactly as it always has been. I am continuing to work with the Sense Support Desk to see if we can debug this.

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