Sorry if this question has been asked already or if I just missed it in the rules themselves, I tried searching and didn't find a satisfactory answer.

When exactly do you Commit Force Die? I see that you can end an Ongoing Effect from Committing Force Die as an Incidental at the end of your Activation, but I'm confused as to when you begin the Ongoing Effects. Specifically, my character has the Sense Basic Power and the Ongoing Effect Control upgrade. Do you have to activate the Sense Basic Power before committing dice, making it an Action? Or do you not need to activate the Basic Power? If so, what kind of action is it to Commit Force Die: Action, Maneuver, or Incidental? Or is it not an action at all and can just be done whenever, even outside of turn?

If you do have to activate the Basic Power to Commit Force Die, what are the rules for "taking a 10" outside of battle to Commit die? As a Light side character, I would not use Dark Side pips, especially outside of Combat, to begin an Ongoing Effect when I could just keep rerolling Force Die until I got White Side pips. Is it generally understood that outside combat you can Commit your Force Power pretty much freely?

Thanks in advance.

When is part of the Action necessary to activate the Force power/talent in question. And there's no roll involved to "activate" an Ongoing Effect by committing your Force die; you simply declare that your Action in the current round of combat is to commit the Force die and so activate that ability.

As an example, let's take the Control Upgrade for Sense to increase the difficulty of incoming attacks. For this example, I'll assume that the PC only has the Sense basic power and the aforementioned Control Upgrade.

At the start of combat, the PC generally won't have the Force die committed, so you can't use that Control Upgrade. As luck would have it, the PC is able to act before any of the bad guys you're facing, and so spends his Action that turn to commit a Force die to the Sense power's Control Upgrade, thus allowing him to use that ability once per turn, such as against that pack of street thugs that decide to rearrange the PCs face with their truncheons when their turn comes up. Since all the PC is doing is committing the Force die, no die roll is needed.

Now, as for committing Force dice outside of combat/structured play, you can commit your Force dice freely. However, some GMs may not care for a PC always having Sense's defensive Control Upgrade active, and the rules do offer a suggestion that if a PC is constantly keeping a Force die committed to power an Ongoing Effect, that the PC starts to suffer strain.