Add 6 and 12 hour timescale options to the Power Meter (on web app)

Product Wishlist
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On the web app, the Power Meter page offers the following timescales:
15 mins, Hour, Day, Week, Month

Those are all useful in their own way, but I would like to add 6 and 12 hour options. I think these would be helpful for certain types of power tracking and troubleshooting.

Related to this, I think it would also be helpful to have set time frames that aren’t dependent on the current time of day. For example, if there was a 6am to 6pm option, that would cover a typical day’s solar production window, and give you a nice clear visual of a day’s production and consumption. Currently the only way to approximate this is to use the day view to see a full 24 hr cycle.

I think another interesting timescale would be the entire solar production window for a day, based on when sense detects wattage coming from the PV system. So this custom solar timescale would vary in length depending on the time of year.

If you are worried about the interface becoming too cluttered with all of the time scale options, you could add a page in settings where the user can choose to display only the ones they want to see. I personally would turn off Month view, as I don’t find it too useful.

If you want to get really fancy about it, you could look at the timescales that people manually zoom to view in the app (assuming you collect that data), and use that data to inform which timescale options to add.

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The web app is more versatile than you might think. You can select whatever viewing window you want by constructing a URL with the start and end times. Try this one - its should show you a nice solar window for 6AM-8PM (in your local timezone) for July 5th, 2019.

https://home.sense.com/meter?start=2019-07-05T06:00:00&end=2019-07-05T20:00:00

It may seem clunky, but you can generate these URLs programmatically or in Excel.
You can also do some really cool stuff programmatically with a programing web interface like Selenium - For instance, capturing custom web app snapshots from dawn to dusk for a range of days.

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Ah, neat, thanks for showing me that! Seems like the existing time scale links are just custom URLs like you created, so adding more of them should be trivially simple, and it seems like allowing the user to create custom time scales would also be possible.

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You are welcome. You’re right, the pre-programed windows are just custom URLs that use a a system call to create the start and end times. But I wouldn’t count on Sense to implement user configurable time windows. Just use expert features like this to grab the viewing data you really want.

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This is a nifty little hack that can work well in the interim. I’m going to write up a little help article about it.

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Drafted this up. You can find it at help.sense.com.

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Hi Ryan,

Looks good! The color coded start and end times with brackets graphic is nice. An error to correct- in the two example links at the end of the article, they each have a space at the end that causes the link not to work. Delete the space and they work fine.

I would also suggest a 6 hour example instead of a 6 month example, as a 6 month graph looks pretty ugly. It would also be good to have one example show modification of the date, and the other show modification of the time. The two week example looks great, keep that one.

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shumakerstephen… When I goto the web app meter, I pick the nearest time slot that I wish to look at then use my wheeled mouse to expand or contract the time window. Make sure though you hit the ‘Now’ balloon if you which to use ‘Now’ as your datum. Pulling the wheel top toward you will expand the window. Away will close (lessen) the window or time you are looking at. my 2 cents… Gerry

Sorry I should add to make sure your mouse pointer is in the time/data window when you spin the wheel to change the min/max time display…

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Yes, I understand that you can adjust the viewing window like that (on a laptop touchpad it uses the pinch/zoom gesture, same as on the mobile app). Still, I find that to be somewhat clunky, it is tough to dial in a viewing window with any accuracy.

I still stand by this request, as I think 6 and 12 hour quick link options would be very useful.

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I agree with the sentiment above. I personally don’t find the current “day” view useful, but maybe some people do. When I click on day, I want to see just that day. When I hit left, I want to see just yesterday. When I look at the week view, I don’t want to see the last 7 days, I want to see the current week. Same thing for month view. It would be a lot easier to compare like time periods.

My personal recommendation would be to keep the 15 minute and 1 hour views, and maybe add a “24 hours” view (basically rename the current day view" and then change day, week, and month to be the current day, week, and month.

Or… and I’m just throwing out idea here. Add a “custom” view. Selecting custom would add a second row of some drop down menus and radio buttons. Would allow you to enter a number, and then select minutes, hours, days, weeks. Another radio button or downdown for “starting from” and have current time or current selection (as in minute, hours, days, weeks that was selected first).

So I could choose the last 73 minutes, starting from now. I could choose the 3 days, starting with the beginning of today. I could choose 2 days, starting from now (ie the last 48 hours). You’d basically just be configuring the custom URL, but you’d be giving us the ability to do it from the website instead of modifying the url every time we want a different view.

The main thing I want is a “current day” view. Also, the blog post mentioned above must be outdated, because the URL it shows doesn’t match the URL my browser shows. Here is the URL for the current “day” time period.

https://home.sense.com/meter?end=2019-08-29T14%3A54%3A25.575Z&start=2019-08-28T14%3A54%3A25.575Z

This is kinda difficult for the average user to understand. They will look at this and say “It doesn’t match what the Sense blog shows, I don’t know what to change”. I know what’s going on; I have a lot computer experience and work in IT. I know that this is an encoded version of the URL that is replacing certain special characters, like the colons, with a % sign followed by a hexadecimal code.

Also… this seems not to work anyway.

https://home.sense.com/meter?end=2019-08-30T00:00:00&start=2019-08-29T00:00:00

This should show the current day, but instead it shows a 15 minute slice of the time period. If I click on “hour” it goes back to showing just the last hour.

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If I try to go back in time and use the start of today and yesterday as the range, so this url: Sense

Then I get a blank graph and if I place the mouse anywhere on it, it shows the consumption at -1w.

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Hi @waterboysh,

In reality the Sense day URL’s are the same as the URL we shared. It’s just that the "%3A"s are substitution characters for colons “:”, and the Z at the end changes the timezone to UTC. But that’s all machine generated so users shouldn’t really have to think about those.

Your first URL gives me what I would expect - a view of today up to present time, in my local time.

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Your second URL has an extra colon at the end. Works perfectly once I remove the colon.

https://home.sense.com/meter?end=2019-08-29T00:00:00&start=2019-08-28T00:00:00

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One more thing I noticed last night, but your questioned forced me to investigate. It appears that the URL only works correctly when the browser window is narrowish. Last night I was getting unexpected results, similar to yours, when I fit the window to my full screen width, but it worked fine with narrower browser windows. Very weird.

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Oh wow, you’re right. Full screen: no graph. Even making with width of my browser window about 75% of the screen width and I get a graph. Make the width a little wider, say 80% of the screen: no graph. That’s weird behavior.

My primary browser is Chrome, but I just tested in Firefox and got the same results. Doesn’t produce a graph if the browser width > 75% of my screen width. My resolution is 1920x1080.

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Same for Safari. And it’s probably not based on number of pixels, but rather a percentage - I’m working with a 5120 x 2880 screen. The web app didn’t used to behave this way.

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I’m seeing the same issue where a window resize is needed but not universally for all links. I’ll pass it along to the web team. If you come across more Power Meter URLs that cause it, send them my way.

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Will do. Thanks

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I feel like the discussion got a little derailed by the bug we discovered in the power meter web view.

I’d still like a way to easily see a day, week, or month view without creating a custom url every time, in a similar fashion as the usage view under trends in the mobile app. But instead of a bar graph we’d get the actual power graph.

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@kevin1 @waterboysh Just a heads up that a fix has been pushed for the web app bug mentioned earlier. Let me know if you’re still seeing it.

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Thanks @RyanAtSense,

Seems to be working though I’m not using on my highest res external monitor right now. But it was failing on with my current external monitor as well, and now works. I’m in the middle of a project to pull data from the web app, so I’m really focused on getting the highest resolution display of the daily waveform.

The size of the browser window influences the amount of data behind the waveform displays. Earlier, with the bug, I was limited to about 4288 data points. Now I’m seeing 7680 with a wider browser window.

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Thanks again - with my 5120 x 2880 LG monitor, the number of data points jumps to 10,560, which mean I get a data point every 35 seconds…