Usage and production update only after the hour

While it is nice to see the Usage and Solar production graph by second, I can only see the total per day , this hour or till now, only after the end of hour. When you already have the data, showing in power meter, why not display the sum in usage trends. I want to know how much power I have used today, till now. It does not make sense to wait till the end of hour and then wait for the usage data to get updated anywhere between 5 and 10 minutes after the hour. In essence, we would never get true data for given day until the next day.

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Good point.

Sense may have considered this but nixed it due to increased processor/network load. The Usage UI is static so, I would guess, does the processing once an hour.

The Solar Bubble (Now) might be another place where the accumulated daily total could be displayed. Settings > General > Show Solar Bubble, could have other display options. Come to think of it, the Solar Bubble size (& the bottom-left display) could be toggled between instantaneous kW and Daily accumulation by a tap-hold on the bubble.

I imagine Sense is working on “Stats” along the lines of what appears in Always On and under Devices. Solar Stats would be a good place for realtime and integrated details.

You can do this with Goals. Just set a Goal for Usage, at End of Day, to be under some pre-defined value that exceeds your standard daily usage. You’ll see it track throughout the day under the Goals card.

Here’s mine:

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I was just going to say that it’s smarter to have that kind of to date tracking in Goals than in Usage or other areas, because

  • Usage is useful specifically because it shows data for full intervals (hours, days, months) vs. partial intervals.
  • You can customize goals for what you specifically want to watch for.
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Good to know!

My modest AC-as-Solar setup that reads as 800W of Solar only when the AC is running wasn’t enough to reveal that the Goals is updating more frequently than once an hour. Is the Trends > Goals refreshing the Daily goal graph without toggling in/out of the screen? “At any point” is obviously refreshing but I have no indication that the Daily goal is updating.

I did that for both Solar production and Usage. It is showing exact numbers as Usage->Day graph, which is 40 minutes old. I dont see how much was used or generated in last 40 minutes.

I dont see it that way. Today should show till now, with partial hour. I dont see any advantage of not seeing that.

I see we can scroll back in time on power meter and can see the stats. If app is able to get that data, why not also let it calculate the sum, if they want to avoid processing on the server.

I’ll defer to @RyanAtSense & @kevin1 on this.

I believe it’s not as simple an implementation as it may first appear.

The instantaneous numbers are, I assume, coming direct from the local Sense monitor to the app/browser with no post-processing (beyond 1/2sec RMS at the monitor) required. The Power Meter is, I assume, rendered by the web server based on a combination of the accumulating mothership (AWS) data and a local monitor cache. Maybe an hour or so of data? I haven’t tried going offline to test things. No-doubt a poke through the forum would be enlightening.

As a user, without any direct visibility into the data stores at Sense except the Sense UI, it’s pretty clear that Sense keeps around half-second “near-instantaneous” data for display, but only aggregates (sums up) data on a hourly, daily and monthly basis for all the analytics. There’s probably a good reason for generating this derived data using only those time intervals - I’m guessing it’s an efficiency/cost basis since it is probably done at the mothership, and doing incremental aggregations for all customers every half second has a much greater cost than hourly (7200x as much computation per hour).

I think there probably are other challenges, as @ixu describes, for realtime updates of accumulated totals the most recent data might reside in the Sense monitor with earlier data residing at the mothership. The cumulative calculation might require a sync, that would be expensive in terms of Sense monitor bandwidth as well as communications efficiency and latency.

Throw in one more challenge - one can have multiple app sessions opened on one account, bot on phones and web app. That means that the client side apps are designed to be fairly thin and “dumb”, without the ability to do local calculations, mostly limited to setup (phone app only), display and naming/configuration (no local calculations).

@vamsi_deepak, not trying to make excuses, but there’s more going on behind the scenes between the Sense monitor, the Sense mothership and the multiple apps connected to account. Some of the things you see as obvious, probably aren’t so obvious and easy. But I agree that there should be realtime updates of real data vs. Goals, even if it is a minute level update.

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Something sounds off in your case then. A Day goal should get updated roughly around every ~10 minutes. I’d suggest writing into Support in that case.

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Yes to this, also useful for folks like me trying to send totals to pvoutput.org