A New Heat Source

I’m a newbie so please bear with me. I have a newly identified heat source today. It is coming on automatically every 23-24 minutes. It stay on about 2.5 minutes with average consumption of 189 watts. Any one have suggestions?

Looks like something thermostatically based (like it’s trying to keep a consistent temp), and it’s pretty small, so maybe a coffee maker? Also, are you in the snow belt? if so, it might be something like de-icing heat elements near your gutters.

That makes sense. I was thinking maybe a fridge at first, but the wattage is too low. We have a small countertop ice maker. There is also a dehumidifier in the crawl space that I have wondered about.

As for location, we live in the southeast. Snow and ice are a rarity here.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Piggy backing. Installed Sense exactly a week ago (today is Thursday). It has accurately ID’ed the garage door opener, a space heater and the older fridge that is kept in the garage. Then yesterday, I was notified that is has found heat2, a “device” that was on last Sunday.

  1. is it normal for a device to be reported 3 days after it was last on?
  2. “Trends” say it was on 123x with 0.3 kWh total usage. Total times on was 29 min 21s.

I plugged back in all devices to that have heating element, i.e. flat iron, hair dryer, another space heater in the spare room, coffee maker, electric kettle, stove, oven, etc. and turned them on. I even plugged in the solder and heat gun that I used for splicing wires to extend the length of the solar CT. Nothing duplicated what Sense found last Sunday. Right now it is listed as Heat2.

Any suggestions? Thanks.
jim

Quite normal, unfortunately. Can be frustrating.

For a long time Sense has been reporting devices found but with zero times on and zero power used (how about trying to figure out that device???). But, that was eventually admitted to being a reporting bug and they apparently have fixed it.

Hi @jimsar9 - sorry I missed this before the weekend!

The community here may have better ideas than I do about what that Heat 2 might be, but I know in our home, Sunday is the day we do the laundry. Initially, our dryer was found as a number of individual heat and motor components that we had to merge into one, so I wonder if it might be some similar type of component of a larger device you only use on the weekends?

It’s also possible that even as you plugged in those devices, Sense didn’t happen to catch them this time around because of other activity going on in your house. For example: when our TV and stereo are on, some other devices aren’t recognized as reliably because there are these large, irregular deviations in power use depending on the brightness of the image, loudness of the music or SFX, etc. Sense is getting better at identifying individual devices from within that noise, but it’s a challenging signal processing problem!

Good luck scouting it out. Let us know when you find it!

Best,
Brad

Hey @andy - feel your pain there!

That should be fixed in v19. Is it working for you now? I hope so!

Best,
Brad

It does appear to be fixed in the current release, many thanks.

Andy

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