Is your house on a well pump or city water ? That could be a well pump misdetected as a heat source
Send a list of all the 240V breakers in your panel - it has to be one of those.
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Another user had trouble figuring out that his outside heat strips to prevent ice dams. Where do you live? Do you have anything outside that this may be?
I do have those, but would those be that high wattage?
I’m not sure. Depends, I guess, on how many you have and how efficient they are.
The highest power I’ve ever seen for roof heat strips was about 1,500 watts (mostly they are in the low hundreds of watts) and they were all 110v.
5,800 watts at 220v is 26 amps, so would generally have a 30 amp breaker.
For it to be Ice cable, the length would be really long at that draw. Around 5 watts a foot is about normal for the constant draw cable. They are also made in a style that fluctuates based on temperature that uses less.
Simple way to test : turn off the breaker for the heating strips and see if the load goes away.
Here is the profile on the my whole house with the dryer on, it cycles a ~4800w tungsten coil with a classic exponential decay on start to steady state, the fan is ~500w.
the impedance of the element changes with temperature.
The dryer device shows the heat element but hasn’t recognized the fan motor…
I think we need to see a higher resolution image of the load profile to take a shot at identifying it. It does look like a temperature response but more detail on the load profile is needed.
Here’s an image of my freezer (no need for the AC until June around here):
it has an inrush to magnetize the iron and the the load profile changes as the fluid moves with pressure changes.
I turn on all the notifications when a new device is found to give me awareness to what’s going on that may have been discovered and add notes as I narrow down what it is. I also run an ecobee thermostat that I maybe able to resolve with the cycling someday…
Did you solve this? Sounds to me like you would benefit from a couple of things: touch the breakers and see which ones are warmer when your mystery wattage is going … at that power consumption things should be running fairly warm; better, use a multimeter to check the breakers. Has the source been Sensed as an “unknown heat” device? Set up a notification for when it kicks on and then you can monitor the breakers more easily as @Christopher suggests . Once you know which breaker it’s on I assume you can start to trace it more easily.
I had a closer look at my dryer and started the Sense monthly update video describing how the 2-detection works. I’m wondering if the line voltage is significantly different between the legs causing the distorted signal sensing. As the load builds, balance usually follows. I don’t have a plot of the voltage to check but @ixu might.
Here is my dryer plot and it is having difficulty on the two legs at the start and end:
I wouldn’t know how to plot the voltage of the legs but you can see it in real time. You would have to have the device running and then go settings—my home—sense monitor. In the middle of the page it shows the current voltage of each leg.
It’s normal if they are not exact. Mine runs from 121-124 volts and between them is generally less than .8 volt difference
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