Installed Sense Solar 3 years ago. Solar system is a leased 5 kw 25 panel enphase inverter system. Purchased Sense mainly to keep tabs on usage versus net meter KW surplus. We can heat our home with gas hot water baseboard or mini-split heat pumps. Usually our net surplus allows us to heat our home until December with heat pumps.
This year, went overboard with heating the garage (projects) and had my first electric bill in 7 years. Hopefully Sense will make me more aware of my net surplus and keep me from going over my net credit.
I was hoping that the Sense app had a way of keeping a running total, yearly, of usage versus solar generation. My anniversary date for net credit will be the end of this month. Is there some way to zero usage and production out at that point? This way I could see from that point forward my KW net credit building up with the utility.
The only way I have found to make this work is to perform a complete reset of sense so it forgets the first 2 months of the year. This is a bummer because sense loses all of the detected devices and it takes 6 months for sense to redetect them once again. In 3 years has sense created a better way to achieve this, without a total reset? Just want the ability to start my sense year on the first of March, rather then January.
I am sure others installed Sense for the same purpose. How are you folks setting up your Sense app to perform this function?
I use my Sense to manage my general production and consumption trending… However, when it comes to my Net Metering and managing the balance if excess electric “acorns” in my account, and ensuring I burn them (and don’t burn too much), I manage that using an Excel spreadsheet…
I kind of like the idea of having a new feature in Sense to manage a Net Metering True-Up window… It’s akin to a fiscal year versus a calendar year in the financial world… But until then, my Excel spreadsheet works well for me…
Interesting use. I too have solar and netmeter. Just installed my Sense (1 month ago). I am keeping an eye on my % of my home power by solar. However, I agree it would be good to have a feature to set the anniversary of solar and have a running total vs. consumption. I suggest putting this on the “wish list” category vs here. It would seem it should be easy since it is possible to tease this info out using excel.
First-off, you have a good suggestion for the Sense Wishlist there - the ability to add in the yearly True-up period into Sense so there could potentially be a True-up yearly view in Sense, kind of like the Yearly view, except using the Billing Period, and the True-up time window. Of course that would have the usual inaccuracies for us folks that don’t have exact monthly Billing Periods or consequently exact yearly True-ups (can be off by a few days). Plus TOU net metering users would have to use cost, since our “acorns” are stored in different bins depending on TOU.
I wouldn’t erase Sense history to track - I would use the Monthly or Billing period summary in Trends to calculate my True-up Total Usage vs. Solar running total, then watch closely during the last 2 months or so to meter out “extra electricity usage”
Yeah… I agree with @kevin1 on avoiding erasing your historic data… The trend data is valuable to me… I would move relevant data to a simple spreadsheet and track it that way…
Thanks for all the suggestions. Not too concerned about the data as I have enlighten to keep track of solar production. Just noticed sense has a reset data function, will that clear out the data from January and February? Have been using the factory reset function the past few years.
Keep in mind that a data reset will wipe all historical power data and devices from your Sense monitor. If you’re sure you want to do a reset, it sounds like a Data Reset is the better option here for you.