Sense Solar

Sense Solar: Home Energy & Solar Production in a Single Glance

We’re pleased to announce that Sense Solar is available. Through the app, you can see your home energy usage and your solar production all in one view.

Thank you for your many emails asking us to make Sense solar-compatible! We're excited to announce that now, through the Sense Solar app, you're able to see your home energy usage and your solar production all in one view. Read on for more information about our system architecture, the solar hardware and the new solar features to our app.

So, let’s take a look at the first solar prototype, which we began testing in late March of 2016. Pictured below are the extra set of CTs clamped around the solar feeds, which then connect to the middle port on the Sense monitor. These are used to measure solar production. Once the solar CTs were set up for our prototype, the next step was to plumb that solar sensor data through our software stack: first from the Sense monitor up to the cloud back-end, and from there to the mobile app.

As you can see, we’ve had the plumbing done for a while now.

Our goal is to be the best energy monitoring system available by providing you with a holistic and detailed view of your home energy. To that end, the Sense Solar app provides a real-time view of solar production on the home screen, relative to your energy usage by device.

The app shows solar production in the Power Meter and in Trends, enabling you to compare production versus consumption both in real-time and historically.

A new solar home screen in the app serves as a hub for all things solar, providing both summary information and quick access to detailed views. Last but not least, we’ve carefully honed the solar setup process so that it’s as quick and painless as the normal Sense setup. This has included matching the first sets of solar CTs at our workshop in Massachusetts by hand to ensure they meet our incredibly high standards for tolerance in our hardware.

Hopefully we’ve given you a sense of what to expect from your solar-compatible Sense monitor. We’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback on the new app features!

Order Sense Solar here to start making sense of your energy use and production.

If you already have a Sense monitor, you can purchase our Sense Solar upgrade for just $50 and attach the new CTs to your solar system and Sense monitor right away.