The first thing you come across when you start exploring the Sense app will probably be the Meter, since it begins to collect data as soon as you connect to Sense, and it shows all power usage being collected by your home’s meter over time, including a yellowish line in the graph that charts solar usage.
The Sense Meter is a graph that updates in real-time, giving you a second-by-second view of how energy is being used in your home. The dark orange line tracking across the screen represents your home’s total energy use. The spikes and dips are, of course, different devices in your home turning on and off, or just running over time.
The basic details for using the Power Meter are discussed in How Do I Use the Power Meter?, so this article will focus on the differences you should look for when you also have Solar in use.
How does the Meter work with solar?
When the Power Meter is also connected to Solar reporting, you should see 2 lines across the chart, the dark orange showing energy use in your home and the lighter yellow line showing solar activity over time.
Note the distinctive arc of the lighter yellow line, which reflects the beginning and end of solar activity during the day and the absence of solar activity over night. On a stormy day, the line will of course look different. All of this is normal. This line should always be working above the baseline if the sun is out.
But sometimes the Meter will also show you that there are issues with the solar reporting, typically due to errors in configuration that need to be corrected.
In this first example, you see that the solar reading is all we see during the day, and that is actually suppressing normal usage reporting.
And in this image, you see that the solar numbers are incorrectly elevating your home's usage reporting.
If images that resemble either of these incorrect phenomema are present in your power meter, your current sensors may need to be moved or changes may be necessary in the configuration file. We recommend that you contact the Sense Support team to report either situation.