6 weeks and one device

Its been 6 weeks, and only the HVAC fans have been found, and that was a week after install, nothing for the last 5 weeks. All our major appliances are LG. TVs are Samsung. Is this normal to be taking so long?

I don’t think there really is a good definition for “normal”. Everyone’s experience is different with some having few detections and other having many. I’m at 2 months today and have 25 but have lost some and would have around 40 if sense and I had not deleted any.
Do you have geothermal or a deep well pump of some sort? They are known to cause “noise” that hinders detection.
Try to be patient as difficult as it is. I personally think a detection a week is not bad at all. There are users with a year or more that don’t t have that many. You may have experiences with detections like I ha e where you will have 4 in one day. That’s happened with me twice now.
You could contact support at support.sense.com
And ask them to take a look. You’ll need patience waiting up to a few days for a response but the quality of support is worth the wait.
Another thing is if your detections are accurately identified, that’s a huge plus. I ha e a lot that are not and will probably end up deleted.

Thanks, nothing geothermal, and no well. Pretty common/generic set up. I’ll give it a couple more weeks before I contact support.

First, welcome to Sense and welcome to the Sense Community!

1 device in 6 weeks is certainly abnormal. @samwooly1 is right that there isn’t a great “normal,” but this is pretty low for detection in a period over a month long. I would encourage you to reach out to Support sooner rather than later. There may be something simple in your install that’s preventing detection from happening faster.

1 Like

Any more detections @casamacwagen?

Negative. Still just the one.

I’m sorry. I really wanted to come back here and hear you say there were more.
Did you contact support? Sometimes they can see why it is that sense is having trouble with detections.
Like the noise created by a deep well pump.

Yes, they were excellent. They found a bug and fixed it, restarted the find process, nothing new however, yet… keeping fingers crossed.

2 Likes

Hang in there, detections will come.
Maybe your bug was holding it back. It will probably have to rebuild data but I’d bet you’ll see a difference in the near future.
Support does an excellent job

1 Like

I understand from Sense engineering that the pump noise problem is mostly due to pump technology, not depth. In my case it’s a “constant pressure” system that uses a variable frequency three phase inverter and motor, so the frequency of the power draw depends on water demand.

From what she said, many (most) wells are just fine, with conventional on/off controls and variable pressure to the home.

@andy, sounds like you ha e that pump design I was referring to tha has problems. I think everyone with these pumps experience detection lagging because of it.
Have you though about changing the pump over and using a CSV (cycle stop Valve) instead?. This type of valve uses a regular pump and would probably help.

Since that would involve pulling out 500’ of pipe, discarding an expensive (several thousand dollars) perfectly good pump and controller, and putting in a new (high capacity due to the geothermal) conventional well system, not to mention going back to water pressure changing all the time, it’s definitely not an option. Thanks for the thought though.

If Sense had mentioned that specific devices defeat their technology, we’d never have bought it in the first place.

I agree about the failure to mention this problem on their part. They should absolutely make it known on their site about these trouble devices and not only have I been verbal about it, others have too. The fact that it still doesn’t reflect this on their site does make me wonder about some of their priorities.
While I’m happy with the product, I still think their marketing is very misleading and downright dishonest.
Another thought I had for your situation is adding another smaller 200 amp panel between the existing and meter. You could then feed the pump from that panel, leave the CT’s where they are and possibly sense would t pick up the noise or as much of it.

Does your pump run all the time or does it cycle on and off?

@andy Have you put a load reactor on the motor side?

Mine is a VFD as well but only 150’ deep. I would put more weight to the sheer amount of electrical devices and activity on your system, not single out the pump.

I’ve had the VFD from the start of my Sense install but installed Geothermal (heat pump and circulation pumps added to the electrical demand.) Detections definitely got worse with the addition of the heat pump.

Hmmm, very interesting thought. Wouldn’t get me the well monitoring I’d partially bought Sense for, but should eliminate the current noise, perhaps letting Sense find much of the rest of the house, including the geothermal system.

I’ll try that idea out on Sense support/engineering.

1 Like

I really believe this would be a fix for a lot of people. The cost of materials would probably be less than $200

It runs only when its gauge tells it that additional water is needed to maintain desired pressure. There is a tiny tank (12 gal I believe) to smooth out transitions.

Then it only runs as fast as needed to maintain the pressure within a couple of PSI. So the waveforms (frequency and amplitude) are dependent on amount of water being consumed, second by second. As the flow stops, so does the pump. I can watch waveform change as I turn on a faucet slightly, then as I increase the flow, the frequency rises, as does the amplitude. As I shut the faucet down, the frequency/amplitude track downward and stop a second or so after the flow stops. From a human point of view, the pattern is really easy to recognize and took Sense engineering only minutes working with me to determine what was probably causing the “noise” and totally verify it. Unfortunately, they also told me that there is probably nothing they can do about it.

It’s pretty cool technology (Franklin Electric SubDrive 75 in my case… http://www.franklinwater.com/products/drives-protection/residentiallight-commercial/subdrivemonodrive/), and provides us LOTS (15GPM for the geothermal alone, plus enough for showers laundry, dishes, etc) of water at very constant pressure. By far the best well system I’ve ever had.

1 Like

If the cycle stop valve produces the same flow characteristics and the pump is more efficient over time, why use these pumps? I do t understand the advantage overall.
I also have municipal water and have only dealt with wells at family’s homes with the old style system and at hunting cabin where it was hand pump.

I’m just going by what Sense engineering told me. They say heat pumps and circulator pumps work pretty well with Sense and I’d provided them a list (large) of my devices. None of them seemed to cause concerns. They focused in on the well pump as the culprit for making my home mostly undetectable after looking at waveform history and running some simple experiments.

I will check with Franklin Electric about the load reactor question. AFIK, there is nothing in addition to their controller, wire, and their pump motor.