Collecting the Heating Degree Days for each building should make the data even more useful, but I think just the data feed from degreedays.net would help inform the identification of devices. I keep my thermostat setpoint constant so the HDD’s from degreedays.net worked pretty well. There is a really good article on the degreedays site that talks about how to do the analysis. In the end you come up with a therms per degree day relationship. Much like you can use MPG to figure out how much fuel you are likely to use on a trip you can predict how many therms it will take to keep the house warm given the outside temperature. If Sense calculated a kWh/HDD for each device and then calculated some statistics on that data set they may be able to determine that the device is weather sensitive. That would have to help with assigning usage to a device.
I have a boiler pump that Sense has identified. It’s usage is tracked until it gets really cold at which point it just stays on 24/7. Then no usage shows up in Sense even though the total usage seems to reflect it’s average wattage. Maybe it’s this plateau that needs to be accounted for… A kWh/HDD does imply a limit. It can only use so much an hour. Maybe this limit is what is causing my pump to disappear. Maybe it’s included in always on? Anyone else have any devices that disappear when left on for longer periods of time than normal?