Sense Monitor CT Placement

[gcsutton]

Added solar CTs today to my existing Sense system. Electrician looked it over for several minutes and we both agreed the right place seemed to be inside the backup gateway, on the input side of the breaker, lower right in the box.

Anybody else do this, and if so, any thoughts on this placement?

 

[jjrandorin]

if you have powerwalls (it sounds like you do) I have read that sense does not do a good job of measuring flows when one has powerwalls. I originally wanted a sense but decided against it after looking into how it does (not ) work very well with solar + powerwalls.

Maybe these threads will help?

Sense monitoring and Powerwall with Solar?

Does Sense energy monitor work with Powerwall?

 

[arnolddeleon]

I'm working through this right now. I currently have them in the gateway on the wires that lead to the generation panel. I'm waiting for Sense support to fix the direction of power flow. I redid the CT installs because Sense was saying a CT had opened. The fact that Sense nows supports a dedicated circuit sensor makes me hopeful that they'll have better support soonish.

I also just started playing with Home Assistant. There is a Tesla integration available for it. There are also integrations that allow you to send usage data to the Sense. It might be possible to feed data from Powerwall to Sense using that method. I'll find out soon enough, plowing through the documentation now.

 

[NuShrike]

I also just started playing with Home Assistant. There is a Tesla integration available for it. There are also integrations that allow you to send usage data to the Sense. It might be possible to feed data from Powerwall to Sense using that method. I'll find out soon enough, plowing through the documentation now.

Nice! And Home Assistant can fake Kasa smart-plugs to Sense so we can finally get other data-sources into it.

 

[gcsutton]

if you have powerwalls (it sounds like you do) I have read that sense does not do a good job of measuring flows when one has powerwalls. I originally wanted a sense but decided against it after looking into how it does (not ) work very well with solar + powerwalls.

Maybe these threads will help?

Sense monitoring and Powerwall with Solar?

Does Sense energy monitor work with Powerwall?

When I talked to Sense they said it would measure PW output as if was solar, along with the solar.

I can live with that, if I get the solar CTs in the right spot...

 

[gcsutton]

I'm working through this right now. I currently have them in the gateway on the wires that lead to the generation panel.

That's what I have, I think.

 

[arnolddeleon]

That's what I have, I think.

Support seems to have fixed my settings so solar is being shown properly again. Of course sense reports output from the Powerwalls as well. The only oddity is that seem to hide negative values from the graphs. They show the values in the power meter but display it as zero on the graph. I'm still working through learning "Home Assistant" but it looks like I will be able to have nice graphs of the data in there. I might also decide to repurpose the the solar CTs to do some dedicated circuit monitoring since I can probably feed the Powerwall data via Home Assistant to Sense.

 

[BrettS]

I might also decide to repurpose the the solar CTs to do some dedicated circuit monitoring since I can probably feed the Powerwall data via Home Assistant to Sense.

I don’t have a sense, so I might be mistaken about this, but I believe that you need the solar CT’s in order to really know how much power your house is using. In a non solar system the sense would just use one set of CT’s to measure the amount of power coming from the grid. Since that’s the only place your house can get power then it knows that the amount of power flowing through those CT’s is the amount of power that your house is using.

However with a solar system your house may be getting power from the grid or from solar. If you only have CT’s on the feed from the grid then the sense won’t know how much power your house is actually using because the amount of power coming from (or going to) the grid no longer equals the amount of power that your house is using. It may be lower, or even negative, depending on how much power your solar is producing, which will screw up your data at best and maybe even confuse the nest and cause issues with it’s detection at worst.

If you had a way to put the main CT’s only on your loads, instead of on the grid feed, and put them in such a position that the solar and powerwalls were not on the circuit that was monitored by the CT’s then that might work, but that will be difficult or impossible to do in many configurations because often the solar and powerwall breakers are in the backed up loads panel.

 

[msweetmo]

Any update? What ended up being your final configuration. I have a slit 400 so I need the solar input for the second 200A panel

 

[gcsutton]

I'm doing this:

1. Moving solar CT to right where solar comes out of the solar panel. I had it in the TEG but that included PW power which confused the Sense. It expects solar to flow only one way.
2. Put house CT on non backup leg. It will only measure consumption. Having it on the incoming house legs also confused Sense since sometimes those two wires carry power back to the utility.
3. My backed up leg will be unmonitored but Sense only has 2 inputs.

 

[Ampster]

Put house CT on non backup leg. It will only measure consumption. Having it on the incoming house legs also confused Sense since sometimes those two wires carry power back to the utility.

It has been a while since I sold my Sense with Solar CTs. I had the house CTs on main house cables and thought Sense calculated Gross consumption? It may have been a setting but I am not sure.
I also have a Rainforest which gave me Net from the meter.

 

[Rich121]

Added solar CTs today to my existing Sense system. Electrician looked it over for several minutes and we both agreed the right place seemed to be inside the backup gateway, on the input side of the breaker, lower right in the box.

Anybody else do this, and if so, any thoughts on this placement?

I just added the solar CT's for sense. There was not much room to fit them in the gateway so I ended up buying the extension cable and running them to the breaker box with Powerwall and solar breakers. Attached them to the output from the solar breaker and got an accurate reading during setup but it would not see the inverter go to zero when shut off. This would make it fail installation. Tried several times, no luck. Ended up contacting Sense support through the app and got a response the same day. They set up the solar on their side and everything is working now.

 

[sorka]

if you have powerwalls (it sounds like you do) I have read that sense does not do a good job of measuring flows when one has powerwalls. I originally wanted a sense but decided against it after looking into how it does (not ) work very well with solar + powerwalls.

Maybe these threads will help?

Sense monitoring and Powerwall with Solar?

Does Sense energy monitor work with Powerwall?

Why would it matter? My 200 amp whole home backup distribution panel has no idea where the electricity is coming from.

 

[jjrandorin]

Why would it matter? My 200 amp whole home backup distribution panel has no idea where the electricity is coming from.

A person in this thread posted one reason:

I'm doing this:

1. Moving solar CT to right where solar comes out of the solar panel. I had it in the TEG but that included PW power which confused the Sense. It expects solar to flow only one way.
2. Put house CT on non backup leg. It will only measure consumption. Having it on the incoming house legs also confused Sense since sometimes those two wires carry power back to the utility.
3. My backed up leg will be unmonitored but Sense only has 2 inputs.

From one of the threads I linked above:

As Support says, don't do it. I have Sense + 2 PWs, and it's just another pile of disappointment on the Sense fire.

If you clamp your Solar and PWs together, you loose all ability to track your solar production via Sense. It's also a question of how to clamp them together as PWs can be spread over 2 breakers independent of your solar breakers. It's better to have a custom install with a combiner box (for PWs + Solar breakers) just to cater to Sense.

Sense refuses to put out a 6-CT device that would easily solve this. One solution I saw was to buy another Sense monitor just to monitor PWs. It may aggregate the date from multiple Sense devices, but check the forums for caveats.

If you don't clamp your Solar and PWs together, Sense looses ability to accurately track consumption AND will randomly auto-calibrate in a way to think your PWs is solar, and your Solar as consumption. The only way to fix it at that point is to delete your Sense account in order to factory-reset it, losing all historical data.

I dont have one, but decided against it based on those threads.

 

[sorka]

A person in this thread posted one reason:



From one of the threads I linked above:



I dont have one, but decided against it based on those threads.

I have 3 PWs but I'm not using my Vue to track solar. Sense wouldn't have any problem for the same reason. If you want to use Sense to figure out where power in your house is going, it'll work just fine ....or at least as fine whether you have PWs or not. I wanted a CT for each breaker which is why I'm using Emporia.

 

[gcsutton]

Why would it matter? My 200 amp whole home backup distribution panel has no idea where the electricity is coming from.

Its more about where it's going as a consumption monitor.