I understand that the being able to combine 2 senses to 1 dashboard has been discussed ad nauseam, and while I agree it needs to be done ASAP… It’s probably a pipe dream at this point.
That being said, at the very least it would be nice to be able to have 2 Senses with 2 Dashboards on the same account and just toggle between them. This would solve the problem for people that have 2 houses and want to be able to easily see them and the people with 2 (or 3, whatever) panels in one house would at least be able to quickly jump between them. Additionally, if combined monitoring becomes a possibility in the future, you’d have historical data for both devices that could theoretically be merged to be shown on one dashboard.
While this solution is far from combining 2 on one dashboard, it’s a step in the right direction and I feel like implementation of this would be relatively easy.
Account switching (which is pretty close to what you’re talking about here) was discussed a bit in the other thread, but I’ll leave this open since it’s a bit more focused and has use cases beyond ad hoc 400A support. You’re absolutely right that it’s easier to build. That said, it doesn’t fully cover the 400A use case but it is good for people with multiple homes, multiple monitors at the same home, or a Sense in, say, an aging parents’ house. I’ll keep my mouth firmly shut regarding roadmap, so I’ll just say “stay tuned” for now.
Yeah, I read the other thread extensively and I felt like this wasn’t addressed thoroughly.
As far as account switching goes, there’s no reason to have more than one account as far as I can tell. Why would I want to open a 2nd email account for the sole purpose of running a 2nd sense? Logically, it would be easier and make more sense, to me at least, to be able to register more than one device to a single account and switch between them.
Another good use for this would be landlords with multiple rental properties, especially if utilities are included in rent.
Ability to rename each device eg, “Home,” “Mom’s House,” “Shop,” “1234 Main St Rental,” etc would be invaluable.
Yeah, I completely understand it doesn’t fully cover the 400a situation, but being able to easily toggle between and quickly see 1500w on one and 1000w on the other is much faster and more convenient than logging out and logging back into a second account. And even if it doesn’t solve the problem, it’s closer to a solution than we currently are and resembles progress that hasn’t been seen for 2yrs from what I can see in the forums.
I’ve had 2 Senses for a good while and one of the first things I requested was this capability. I quickly realized that, while convenient in some cases, keeping the accounts and monitors with a one-to-one relationship has distinct advantages … especially for a young, small company that has primary focus elsewhere. I won’t go into great detail about why that is because it’s been hashed out ad nauseam elsewhere, but here are a couple of thoughts:
Privacy & security is often best implemented in hardware. It’s only in recent years, after decades of cellular phones, that you can have multiple numbers on a single phone.
Accounts (logins & backend cloud data) that are linked to multiple pieces of hardware can present complex challenges of integration & administration … it’s often not as easy as it might seem.
I have two Sense monitors but so far only the one installed. I also have two breaker panels, but they are over 400ft from each other and I’m running solar. I have yet to have any device on the other branch of the service to be found, in fact I can’t even run a powerline internet extender since the services are either completely separated at the pole, or are just too far away.
So basically just need two separate Monitors to show up on the same account, all devices are separate entities and will never be duplicated between devices, then just take the totals that you already have for each monitor and add them together.
Put a disclaimer checkbox when adding a second monitor that its an experimental feature and some devices may be found multiple times and that it may not be accurate.
I’m going to suggest that anybody who has 2 or more Senses and is waiting for single account or account switching, try Home Assistant as a “combining overlay”. I finally brought up Home Assistant on an old PC (Intel NUC) and the Sense integration works transparently and quickly. Home Assistant brings sampled data together from all your Sense accounts, as well as other sources, and offers tons of options for setting up customized panels and dashboards. Two samples below, showing data combined from both my Sense units.
That being said, @kevin1 shared a way that he’s combined multiple monitors into a single dashboard of data using Home Assistant. He posted a great overview of the project below.
I am now up to 4 Sense units. While I could list items I would like to see added, I have 4 because I am seeing the value with the functionality already available, and it appears that the team is actively improving the system. A quick way to switch accounts would be nice, but I wouldn’t want to take someone away from working on identifying more of my devices to add it. Getting more detail from my ‘Other’ bubble is definitely higher priority for me.
They are all on different sites. 1 is an off-grid island powered by solar & batteries, with the solar CTs monitoring solar production. The site has old buildings and with very little soil (rocks), getting good grounds is an issue. The site has some old buildings and wiring that has been patched together over the last century by people with various levels of competence. I am hoping Sense will help identify wiring issues and it will provide the data I need to support conservation instead of adding more batteries, by replacing some old power hungry fridges with fewer, newer more efficient ones. The other sites are simple residential grid-tied setups, but my work is with electric utility power distribution grids, so I am hoping to review the data from each device and identify correlations between smartmeter events or grid issues and the data picked up by sense.
Thanks, and yes, it is a great little property. Hen Island is in Lake Erie. While it is on can Canadian side of the border, it has been owned by an Ohio fishing club since 1897. They have some impressive guestbooks with a lot of history, a couple of the names in the book are former presidents Grover Cleveland and William McKinley.
When it comes to doing work on an island, the logistics make every job harder and more expensive, quickly overwhelming an individual. The club has been successful in running for so long by having a group of 25 members who own it. Each pays annual dues and all who are still able, try to take their turns to participate in keeping the place up. There are pictures and more fun info on club website, but it does not let me add a URL here, so just google “Quinnebog Fishing Club” or type the name without spaces and add dot com.
When I first visited as a guest in 2017 I quickly noticed that in order to power all of the equipment, a large diesel generator was being used. The drone of the generator continued all day, and into the night, only to stop when the last people to be would shut it down, and everyone would hope they had a charged flashlight near the bed in case they needed to find a washroom in the dark. There was a sense of relief when the generator shut down and you could hear waves against the shorts, or the breeze through the trees.
I decided to put together some options to move to solar. The club was very receptive to the idea and at the fall meeting in 2018 approved the budget for the solar project. While undersized for a PV+battery off-grid system, we knew many power saving practices (incandescent to LED) could reduce our load, and we still had the generator available to help out on cloudy days.
The current system has panels feeding inverters and the AC panel, as well as batteries and battery inverters. When an event leaves the batteries with a lower than required state of charge in the evening, we fire the generator for a couple hours so it can both cover the load, and push it’s excess capacity into the batteries to keep things going until the sun rises.
It’s not directly related, but we recently filmed a video with a Sense user that connected Sense to his food truck and he’s doing some awesome stuff with it. Definitely worth a watch if you’re interested to see what some folks are doing with Solar! Also, let us know if we can be of any help. We often film user testimonials and would love to work with you on something as you continue to add efficiency to your property .
This is great! It gave me another great use for Sense on the island.
Since we don’t run the generator often, and it is an older unit, I decided against using the inverter auto-fire option to call the generator when needed, and instead we check on the battery state of charge in the evening to see if it is needed. The SI6048 inverters we have are a model 1 year before they added the new web control options, and retrofitting is way more $ than it should be, so we walk up to the inverters to check.
Using the detailed Sense data that we are now collecting, I will get a more accurate battery bank capacity and will then be able to identify the % of battery usage from our device load. Using your APIs, I should then be able to display the battery state of charge in real-time and send alerts when it is projected to require generator assistance to make it through the night.
I’m just here to say that I love Sense, and want to give y’all up in Cambridge a little nudge on this functionality
It would be quite nice to have, and I know it’s been in discussions for quite a while. If I was a better big data/backend dev, I would apply to that open position just to work on this! I know I applied to the open React position a while ago, and I have no hard feelings about that, even if you guys DON’T use typescript .
When this functionality becomes available, I will look to buy three or four new units, a nice little sum of money for your sales department. Maybe that will help encourage you to spend the resources on it?
Once again, just an otherwise extremely happy sense user who would like this functionality.
As you might have seen in an earlier post, I use Home Assistant to roll waveforms from multiple Sense monitors into a single display, along with mixing in data from my Ecobees and Tesla car chargers. Very useful in putting together the big picture of energy usage.
I’m curious if multiple homes for a single login was still on the roadmap? By definition those that have more than one sense monitor are your biggest cheerleaders! It may be somewhat of an edge case to have more than one monitor, but the current implementation has a ton of friction as it is now
Upvote!
If @sense isn’t considering implementing this, would you open the data and let the community take care of building the tech for you? Cross reference to community.sense dot com/t/official-api/2848/3.
regarding roadmap, so I’ll just say “stay tuned” for now.
. If you ever feel comfortable sharing photos, I’m sure they’d be welcome!
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