Specify Always On devices

We all have “always on” devices.

Wouldn’t it be good to be able to enter a bunch of your devices that are “always on” that remove the total from the “Always On” category.

I would say you should either have a Watt measuring device, or use Sense, by temporarily powering that device on and off and watching the difference in the sense monitor.

If these devices collectively use more than the “Always on” it would result in a negative value, but I suspect it would be close.

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It would be nice to list out some common “always on” devices and estimated draw… I like that idea.

So am I to understand that Sense will never identify these devices because they are never turned on and off?

[quote=“davidferri, post:3, topic:441, full:true”]
So am I to understand that Sense will never identify these devices because they are never turned on and off?[/quote]

Yes (unless there are some characteristics during operation that can be recognized, and that they know how much power that device uses - this is very doubtful)

It would be nice if you could enter your manually determined Always On devices and their power draw so that they could be included in the running cost breakdown.

They could be footnoted to indicate that these are user supplied estimates. Obviously this would be for each user separately (local to their app).

Thanks for the suggestion. We do have plans to make Always On a little more of a known quantity. We’ll keep this in mind.

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I wish you could hit the Always On bubble and be taken into a list of devices that are always on… For example, I leave my computer running 24/7 but I would love to know how much power it uses each month… Sure I could figure that out manually outside the app but that’s besides the point…

Is there anyway for it to discover my computer if I turn it off, back on, etc? If I did, and it did discover it, would it then show me it was on 24/7 or would it move that power over to “always on” ?

Thanks for any replies.

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Related news about these nasty “Always On” loads –

Under a grant from the California Energy Commission, our company has developed an open database of residential “idle load” devices, available at ildb.hea.com. We were paid to create the database, pre-populate it as much as possible (169,000 devices so far), and make it available to the public and to any interested third parties (via a web api).

This type of public resource has not existed in the past, and we’re hopeful companies like Sense might take advantage of it and grow it over time.

We’re holding a public webinar on the project tomorrow morning at 9am Pacific Time if anyone’s interested. Click here to join at that time.

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Thanks for sharing, Steve. This sounds very interesting. I’ll try and tune into the webinar.

Cool webinar @steve !
It sounds like you guys have an amazing database of detailed idle power data by make and model number. 169,000 different devices is a great starting point !
It would be really cool for Sense to link the Home Inventory to this to obtain crowd-sourced data for filling out, and possibly fine tuning idle/Always On power for different devices. Maybe I should add to the Wishlist ?

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As a minimum it would be useful if the always on “device” included a “notes” section like all the other devices. This would allow the user to maintain notes about the devices that are most often included. This also would extend the device inventory information.

It would be helpful to be able to set goals by month rather than allowing only a single goal for all time. Our electricity usage is dominated by air conditioning costs. This is seasonal, of course. Usage in April was less than 520 kWh, however, usage in July was nearly 800 kWh. Setting a single goal of say 800 kWh is useless every month but July.

A feature that suggests goals based on previous usage would be convenient, but not essential.

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