I’m on my 10th week with Sense now and it still hasn’t “detected” our fridge - an older 80’s model Sub-Zero. This is particularly frustrating as our primary motivation for getting Sense in the first place was to help us decide whether or not it’s time to replace the Sub-Zero despite the fact that it still runs great. Sense has been utterly silent on this topic thus far.
To be fair, Sense HAS given us useful information about some other aspects of our energy usage and other devices in our home - just not the one we really wanted.
Are my concerns reasonable? Or is 10 weeks not very long in Sense-time and I’m just being impatient?
I think patience is in order. Sense is just ramping up its customer base - and with that the number of appliances it has to learn from. I can totally understand why - at this stage - there’s a slow learning curve for most everything which has a lot of the early adopters upset.
Sense as a company was born from the ideas of machine learning and speech detection. Just like, as a kid, your vocabulary and word recognition was real limited at first and then your learning curve for comprehension was much steeper as you grew up - expect the same from this whole process.
Be patient and just sit back and enjoy the ride. In a year, we’ll be able to tell the new guys how “we had to wait a month for our microwave to be identified!” I understand why you purchased - my reasons were the same. But this device is just now learning to speak - it’s hard to condemn it for not knowing what the word “onomatopoeia” means
A question, too - can you at least visually identify your fridge on your usage graph? We don’t have a lot of things in our house, so I can very easily id it (especially at night when nothing else is on). You might at least be able to visually identify it and estimate how much energy it’s using. You can compare that to some of our posts in another thread and decide how to proceed. We have a brand new fridge, and I can barely find it it’s so efficient. I’d expect an older model will be pretty easy to visually id?
I have a Sub-Zero 632/0 purchased in 2004 and Sense has been having problems finding components from it also. I’ve also been told by several sources that the Sub-Zero could be one of my energy hogs, so I feel your frustration. I installed on Sep 20th, Sense found what looks like a compressor on Sep 27th, lost the compressor and found a different device load it showed under the same device, then on Nov 28th the load went from 1,041w to 1,116w as though it was yet another device. Then from Jan 7th, there was no load most days except for a few 514w, 707w, and 1,029w spikes that match the patterns seen previously from Oct 6th to Nov 27th. From Jan 15th to now (Jan 19th) this device has returned to the same load and pattern as prior to Jan 7th.
There is a set of cold start problems Sense is coping with in their ML models, but I suspect there might be some specific wrinkles to the design and operation of Sub-Zero units. Yesterday I posted the list of components in my unit that I got from Sub-Zero in another thread. It’s hard to figure out which loads might map to which component (and whether the loads on this device are from the fridge/freezer at all), but it’s a start.
