Since Sense first launched, we’ve worked hard to provide you with detailed energy consumption and production information, down to the subsecond level. Now, for the first time, the dollar and billing cycle enter the picture.
kWh, meet the $
Dollar amounts are another powerful way to understand your energy habits. To get started, navigate to Settings > My Home > Electricity Cost and tap the ‘Show cost’ slider to turn the feature on. There, you can also enter your electricity rate. Not sure what your rate is? We show the national average below for reference, and if you select your home state in My Home > State, your state average as well.
With electricity cost enabled, you can see how much money you’re spending in real-time on the ‘Now’ or ‘Power Meter’ screens, get an idea of a device’s monthly cost in the ‘Usage’ section, or see how much money you’re spending over different time periods by visiting the ‘Trends’ screen under ‘Usage.’ While there, tap a device in the ‘Trends’ view list and see how much a device consumes, not only as a percentage, but also as a number of kWh and $. Take control of the almighty dollar!
Sync up with your electric bill
Next to ‘Electricity Cost’ in ‘My Home,’ you’ll find the ‘Billing Cycle Start’ option. Select the day of the month that your billing cycle begins, and a new time period called ‘BC’ (billing cycle) will appear in the ‘Trends’ section. This will display your energy consumption and production over the previous billing cycle month.
Note: Sense does currently not factor in tiered rates, time of use rates, or demand charges. Additional discrepancies may exist between your electric bill and Sense, due to data interruptions such as power outages or Wi-Fi connection issues. If you notice a large discrepancy and do not believe it’s due to any of the reasons above, please reach out to us.
Sounds great can’t wait to see it. Obviously having not seen it I don’t know the answer but am wondering if it just has one fixed rate or has capability for time of day billing. I and I assume many others pay different amounts for purchased power during peak and off-peak hours.
Check out the “note” at the bottom of the release notes (they’re long I know ). Currently just have one rate input and do not account for time of use rates, tiered rates, or demand charges. They are something that we will be looking to add in the future, however. Think of this as a starting point for this kind of functionality!
For those of us with solar, TOU and tiered rates would be a great addition to Sense. It would help me understand and control my power usage and billing. You folks are working hard to improve the Sense monitoring system for your customers and it shows with every update.
So awesome — two great features that help out tremendously with how I am using Sense.
When I plugged in my rate and my billing cycle and compared my current billing cycle cost to what my provider shows so far for this cycle… pretty dang close (<$5 difference).
Being a developer I understand the complexities of building all of the TOU plans for all of the different areas. I think a simple, single rate is a very good start. People can always estimate by putting in an estimated, average rate. I put in my highest rate for now.
Great start, even though I’m a PG&E California (distribution and transmission) user with SolarCity solar, plus a separate electricity generation supplier, Peninsula Clean Power. A few challenges.
Billing periods start/finish on different days of each month. My billing cycles range from starting on the 18th to the 21st of every month.
Many differences prices for different components of my energy.
SolarCity solar electricity is a flat rate 10.6c/kWh - not sure this should even be part of the costing since it can’t be ascribed to any device except maybe Always On
The rest of my electricity is the sum of two different suppliers that both have separate TOU/SOU (season of use) prices:
Generation - Peninsula Clean Energy is has 3 TOU prices for each of 2 different seasons.
Transmission and Distribution - PG&E charges based on both tiering multipliers plus 3 TOU prices for each of 2 different seasons.
Both TOU/SOU and tiering can clearly be ascribed to particular device cycles… So hopefully you can one day support in a general way that works for multiple suppliers.
I’m guessing that PG&E will be a very common energy supplier Sense will need to deal with, so please feel free to contact me if you want more details on PG&E’s complex billing structure…
I’m on TOU with three rates each 24hour day. Summer TOU hours are also different from Winter TOU hours. Yeah, it gets complex.
For now, I just calculated my average and added it to the app. To get my average, I looked at my last bill and took the total cost(including taxes) and divided it by how much electricity I consumed in that period. It gave my rough average TOU cost. Doing 12months will have both winter and summer average combined which is even better.
$1000 / 7000kWh = $0.1429/kWh or 14.29¢/kWh
edit: Here is TOU clock that I was trying to explain
Great features however I am not sure between rate fluctuations and billing options and variations, this is going to work for most.
I am a PSE&G customer in Long Island, NY and they only read my meter every two months and that date fluctuates. On months where there is a meter reading, I get a breakdown of usage and charges. During the other months, it’s just a regular bill with no usage data. I do have the option of manually submitting a meter reading.
I am on a balanced billing plan which means I pay a set amount based on my last year of usage. As I get closer to the end date (every August), my balanced billing amount might adjust to make sure I don’t owe a lot at the end.
Not sure how I will get this to effectively work for me in Sense given the above. One suggestion would be to allow us to put in a start date and end date, as now it just uses a rolling 30 day billing cycle. My billing cycle from my previous bill was 68 days. You can see how it flucatues for me below.
I’m a recent convert to TOU with ComEd (IL) so I put my former flat rate into Sense. I’m sure it was coincidence but the Sense total and my first bill under TOU were within $2 of one another. However, the bill also stated what I would have been charged under the flat rate plan and I saved $48. Not bad over a $271 bill.
A discovery under the TOU plan, a few days rates went negative in the middle of the night, just as I have the Tesla programmed to charge. So I’ve been paid to charge the car. Woo hoo!
App Store shows version 1.15.0 but only displays open option. When I open Sense app and go to about, it still shows 1.14.2. If I delete app and reinstall will it have to learn all over?
Update: uninstall and reinstall fixed the problem.
For Sense users in the U.S., there is a database and API of electric utility rate structures, including complex tiered and time-of-use tariffs: Utility Rate Database | Open Energy Information. Rates for the top 200 utility companies (covers 70% of electricity sales) are kept up to date. Sense could potentially pull in rate structure information from the API: Energy Information, Data, and other Resources | OpenEI
In the meantime, it would be great to be able to download a csv of my usage (even aggregated to hourly data) so that I could calculate my bill myself offline, and consider how my bills might change if I opt in to a TOU rate.
One other, easier, suggestion would be to add an input in the Sense app for monthly customer charge. This could be used to differentiate between the estimated bill (includes customer charge) and the real-time marginal electric rate (cents per hour) shown on the time series graph (does not include customer charge). For example, my average rate is $0.14/kWh, but my marginal rate is $0.13/kWh because my fixed customer charge is $6.75 per month.
To me it looks like the solar is in front of the usage; in the past it was behind the usage. Perhaps the solar production was a lighter shade of yellow, maybe?
The end result is that it makes it a bit harder to see usage.
When I looked today the color coding for solar and mains power was back to
normal. That seems real strange! Apps don’t often change on there own so
for now I am going to keep a eye out for the strange shift I noted before,
dark orange for solar and light orange for mains. Maybe I got confused!
). Currently just have one rate input and do not account for time of use rates, tiered rates, or demand charges. They are something that we will be looking to add in the future, however. Think of this as a starting point for this kind of functionality!
