Since installing Sense, I have replaced (or otherwise retired) several devices that had been detected. For example, I’ve replaced my fridge and dishwasher (the new fridge has been detected, but not the dishwasher yet). I have also retired (and not replaced) a bottle warmer from when my babies drank from bottles (sniff, they’re so old now at 16 months!). I was wondering if it’d be possible to mark old devices as retired so that they wouldn’t ever be seen as “on” again, but to keep them around for historical data purposes. For instance, I think Sense confused my dryer for the bottle warmer earlier today. If Sense didn’t know what the load was without attributing it to the retired device, calling it Unknown would be fine (and would be more correct than using the device I know to be no longer in use).
For replacements, I know I could use the “merge device” function to have the old fridge and the new fridge just be THE fridge, but for some devices, there isn’t a replacement (or it hasn’t yet been identified).
Seems like a reasonable request, though doing something intelligent with “retirement” (remove the model from the monitor, plus don’t let it come back, yet don’t delete the history) depends heavily on capability of Sense’s model management, which I think is still undergoing some important evolution right now.
I have an interesting retirement situation as well, but not as much of an issue since my first recirc pump was never detected as such, and ended up on an HS110. I was forced to replace my leaky hot water tank about a week ago, so now I have a tankless hot water heater (gas) that has a built-in recirc, so I simply placed on the same HS110. I’m going to watch it carefully to see if the Idle vs Off vs On adjust to the new behavior of the new water heater.
Here’s a comparison between recirc/electrical usage between traditional tank heater and a tankless Rinnai.
I have a Rinnai with built in circ pump too and have been really hoping that the pump would be detected since I automate it coming on when the shower lights turn on. I have wanted a reliable detection to know that it is actually on so I could turn it off. I have had my Sense installed since late August and no detection so far. . Please let me know if yours does.
@ritchierich,
Mine will probably never be detected now that it is on a smart-plug, because Sense tries to not re-detect something that’s already being monitored on smart-plug. I was impatient since I needed to see what the new usage pattern looked like. After seeing it (above) from smart-plug, it looks like it has multiple components (big spikes, little spikes and plateaus). Based on what I have seen from what Sense does detect on my furnace, Sense would probably only detect the big spike component.
If you are talking about a smart-plug that doesn’t communicate with Sense, here’s my speculation:
First, Sense won’t “know” about the smartplug, so it won’t try to suppress detections that align with power changes through that smartplug (as it does with integrated smartplugs).
If the smartplug uses a relay to switch power to the device, then it’s going to look very similar to using a wall switch. It’s likely Sense will detect the device the same way as if it was switched on via a wall switch.
If the smartplug uses a triac, or other sold state switching, then the on/off signature might look different from a wall switch. Might affect detection.
There’s another consideration - many devices that we might put on smartplugs might have their own internal switching mechanisms (thermostats, on switches, etc). If that’s the case, then that smartplug is unlikely to affect the real on/off signatures.
Excellent! I really appreciate your thorough, well-articulated response…
All of my generic smart plugs can stay! I will benefit from eradicating vampire-power, while potentially being conducive to Sense detections. Patience is the name of the game…
@kevin1, how does Sense handle the case where a device that has been detected, such as a refrigerator, is then plugged in through a smart plug like HS110 (for consumption monitoring, not for on/off control)? Which device has the priority…the fridge device found by Sense’s AI by monitoring the consumption CT, or the data from the HS110? Is Sense good about not double counting such power…i.e. each device reporting the same power? (If both devices did report the same power, I assume the “Other” bubble/device erroneously has lower power at the time.)
I have had some experience with putting an HS110 on a device, my furnace (actually both) that had pre-existing detections. Two things I learned from that.
Once you add an HS110, you have the option to tell it what is plugged into it, be it one or more existing detections, or another device description. If you link the HS110 to an existing detection, you won’t see double counting.
For a multi-component device like a furnace, it’s better to use a smart-plug if you can. Even though Sense reliably detected the on/off of my main blower motor, it missed finding other smaller components, including the initial ignition fan and igniter sequence.
If you add the smartplug before Sense detects a device, Sense actively tries not to detect the on/off power swings as a new detection, though it might occasionally fail. Then, the fix is to use the manage tab to tell Sense that the smartplug is associated with the new detection.
This thread seems to have gotten a little lost in some specific details.
Here’s the request as I understand it. Please have the product team consider:
Request:
Allow users to remove device without removing history.
Benefit:
Users of Sense like going back in history and seeing not only whether they’ve changed power consumption from month to month or year to year but what devices might have contributed to that change. Removing devices may be a way potentially to improve device detection, as Sense will know that the device’s signature is no longer valid.
Suggested UX:
I suggest storing history be more of an opt-out. When removing a device add an option to clear history, where default is to keep.
I agree with the need for a way to mark devices inactive. Here is another case where that would be useful: seasonal devices. Examples include air conditioners during the winter and furnaces or space heaters during the summer.
An email I got from technical support said that when a device becomes inactive, the artificial intelligence engine starts to expand that device model’s range, believing that it has been missing device firing rather than that the device is not running. That could lead an air conditioner detection that worked perfectly one summer to behave poorly when spring comes around. If we could mark air conditioners as inactive when we stow them for the winter, that would keep the model definition stable until spring.
Today I found another reason why marking devices inactive would be useful. I’ll have to give a little background to explain.
I had native detections for both my clothes washer and clothes dryer, and both worked well. Last week I replaced both laundry machines. The native detection for the clothes washer actually worked immediately, which was wonderful. The dryer was not so lucky, however. Since I knew that dryer was gone for good, I deleted the device after saving a copy of the data.
Today Sense proudly announced that it had discovered Motor 3. Usage patterns for this motor looked suspiciously like the clothes dryer, so I charted the usage of each. They overlapped very well, so it is confirmed that Motor 3 matches the original dryer definition.
As illustrated by this example, the ability to mark a device inactive would allow the Artificial Intelligence engine to not waste its time (and mine) re-detecting devices that are gone. Did I mishandle how I communicated to Sense the replacement of my clothes dryer?
This feature is needed. I got rid of a Chest freezer and replaced it with a new one. I deleted the old freezer the next day from Sense and just yesterday it showed up as a new device along with another refrigerator that I got rid of as well.
I’m having my kitchen renovated right now, so I’ll soon have a bunch of devices that will need to be deleted. It would be nice to have this feature so I can compare usage between, for example, my old and new fridge.
If there were a way to mark the heat pump mode inactive (as in the OP above) then Sense might come up with a separate native detection for the cooling mode which would be more reliable. Sense never re-detect the exact same device definition, so it would be bad to delete the heat pump device during cooling season, as you would never get your heat pump mode definition back.
I was able to have a longer conversation with Data Science about this and they were able to correct my earlier statement, which was a bit vague.
There are several different ways Sense detects devices, either a whole-device or as an individual component. We’re going to be writing a blog on this in the future that gets into the more technical aspects, but for right now I’ll leave it at that.
If a user deletes a component detection, Sense starts “from scratch” in attempting to re-detect the physical appliance. Sense may create another model attempting to target the same physical appliance or component (which is what I was referencing in my initial response.)
For the entire device detection, we would not re-issue the same model for the same device but there is nothing stopping the model from showing up again as a new device.
It get’s a bit more complicated than that, which is why I’ve set up some time to write a blog on this with Data Science next month to go into more detail on the different methodologies we use to detect devices.
. Please let me know if yours does.