Always ON at 1683 watts but all the breakers are Off

[lance]

I used average because Ben used average. My apologies for having misspoke. I understand from the article. I still feel it’s represented the same as all the others which are “real time” values and that is confusing to an end user. To me the value has little use until things settle down for my system.

[jdtsmith]

Let’s say you have 1000W of live power measured. Suppose Sense has identified several devices that together account for 500W of that power. Suppose it has also found that in the last 48 hours, the least amount of power your home has drawn was 200W: this is your Always On, that’s it.

So what do you see? Sense makes the reasonable assumption that the low power level mark of the last several days consists of devices that are still running. So you see 500W of actual device bubbles, 200W of Always On, and 300W of “Unknown”. Think of Always On like Unknown, not like (a collection of) devices. But instead of being entirely unknown, Sense is telling you “I don’t know what’s drawing this power, but it’s always doing so”.

One feature I’d love to see is a historical graph of my Always On power. That’s how I use it. When some light gets left on in the attic, for example, it shows up in my Always On in a few days. edit: you can look at the historical kWh usage per day, for example, but just showing a long list of Always On Watts would be more useful IMO.

[dianecarolmark]

@jdtsmith

One feature I’d love to see is a historical graph of my Always On power. That’s how I use it. When some light gets left on in the attic, for example, it shows up in my Always On in a few days. edit : you can look at the historical kWh usage per day, for example, but just showing a long list of Always On Watts would be more useful IMO.

Yeah, I use the “Usage” graphs for the “Always On” pseudo-device, and I recently discovered the tooltip that gives you the exact kWh when you mouse/finger over each bar, but I find myself wondering what really happened to cause my “Always On” to go up from ~300 watts to ~400 watts on March 28th and then go back down to ~300 watts on March 29th. Maybe it’s not important because, as you said, “Always On” is the bucket to subtract out things that you’re not supposed to focus on.

Maybe someday we’ll get a toolkit for “Always On” analysis?

[JGC]

OP here,

Okay my Always On is now at 3397w from 1683w. It is obvious to me that when you add the Always ON to Other to any other On devices it always total up to what is shown on the Power meter…

I therefore conclude that Always ON is not a subset of any other bubble but is considered by Sense a device by itself…

So if that makes any sense, when I close all my breakers (except Sense) , the Power Meter would not subtract the Always ON wattage in real time and leave me guessing from which breaker or breakers does this Always On wattage is coming from…

Here are some screen capture to illustrate what I am saying:

[kevin1]

I did some analysis of my hourly Always On a while back via export:

Making Sense of 'Always On' - Chapter 1 - Different 'Always On' Calculation over Time?

Since I have been on a bender removing hourly datapoints that have some dropout in them, I’ve been able to dig a little deeper into my weird Always On distributions. Here’s the original data covering 17 months… Remember: blue is hourly data here, red is aggregated daily. The orange dots on the top represent hours where no data was available (a big data dropout). [image] Same chart with good hourly data points in green, data points subject to data dropout in orange: [AlwaysOn] Here’s the h…

Two things helped explain big changes in my Always On, when everything else in my house appeared stable.

• Big downward drops in Always On are an indicator of data dropouts, either from the Sense monitor to your history data, or from SmartPlugs to the Sense monitor. Three words on data dropouts - 1) Sense has greatly reduced the number of dropouts I have seen since I did this analysis, 2) even if you see a dropout in your history timeline and export, the full data is often still makes it to the Sense mothership, and 3) dropouts can also come from networking issues on your/my side. Dropouts of over 1/2 hour combined over a 48 hour period can wreak havoc on Always On, both on the onset of the dropouts hitting the calculation, and on the recovery.

• Sense has also been fine tuning the Always On calculation over time for stability, more realistic representation and for new features (Always On for smartplugs). But they will generally let us know when they are tweaking the calculation.

[jdtsmith]

Does that mean Sense includes as “0W” all the time slices with missing data it uses to calculate the bottom 1% for Always On? Seems pretty obvious to exclude those from the calculation…

[jdtsmith]

Always On changes only slowly, on a day-to-day timescale. If you go around and unplug all your wall warts and other vampire power users, Always On will update in the following day or two. When flipping breakers, do not look at Always On, look at the total power. The Always On description even tells you this.

[jdtsmith]

My guess: you left something on somewhere in the house for more than a day or two, that you usually shut off daily. That’s what it’s always been in my case. Finding it is the difficulty. Maybe I should set an alarm for 3am. This time of year, kids leaving their fans on 24/7 seems to be a common culprit. And since we usually run fans at night, and middle of the night is when power touches its minimum levels, I expect Always On to creep up in the summer… It doesn’t have to be always on to show up in Always On: it just needs to be reliably on during the time when minimum power usage is likely (night, for me). If they just called Always On “Minimum Power in the last few days” it would be less confusing to people I think…

[kevin1]

Based on my experiences, the missing time slices in the history timeline were treated as zeros for the purposes of the Always On calculation. Throughout 2017-2018, big downward glitches in exported hourly Always On were a strong predictor that a history timeline had a dropout.

Making Sense of 'Always On' - Chapter 2 - 'Always On' Blips

I decided to do one more probe into Always On data to see how it has varied over time in my household for as long as I have had Sense data available (reset at the start of Aug 17). First a view of the detailed data: Red dots are aggregated daily Always On totals Blue dots are hourly Always On x 24 (to normalize with daily) Green dots on the bottom indicate that there was some good data for that clock hour (still could be a data dropout for part of that hour). Orange dots at the top indicate d…

While it would seem like a no-brainer to exclude the “missing” data points from the Always On calculation, I think there is something trickier here at play. Based on what I have seen, many of the “dropouts” in the Total Usage (not smart plug) history timeline were not really dropouts, they were errors/glitches in Sense’s realtime conversion/data management from the raw data, to the history timeline. Even though the history timeline looks like it is simply displaying data from the monitor, that isn’t the case - the raw data (microsecond level measurements) goes through a number of calculations before it becomes the 1/2 second data updates we see in the Power Meter.

I say this because I have worked with the Sense support guys to try to reduce the number of dropouts I was experiencing in late 2018. Two themes emerged:

1. At least for me, the dropouts mostly correlated with opening up or running the Power Meter running live on one ore more devices. Turn off the Power Meter, and refrain from opening it as frequently as I was, back in mid-late 2018, and I would see fewer dropouts.

2. During a couple of deep dives by the support guys to sort out the source of these dropouts, they were a bit confounded. It seemed that my raw data at the Sense mothership was intact, but portions of the history timeline had been zeroed out. In my mind, likely related to memory management of near-realtime display data in the Power Meter vs. long term storage of the history timeline.

I still have regular shorter dropouts, but they are typically short enough to not affect my always on.

[lance.robert.brown]

Putting aside a discussion about the meaning and calculation of Always On, the OP seems to have a real issue of phantom kW’s measured, based on the screenshots posted. Seems to me that it’s either a sensor problem or a major unidentified power draw. I agree with the advice of opening a service ticket. One other step I haven’t seen anyone propose: compare Sense power meter to the utility meter. Whether it’s digital display or analog spinning dial, ~4 kW should be easy to notice.

[JGC]

Thank you for your suggestions Lance !

Before I installed Sense, I already knew there was something wrong with our electricity consumption… Sense seems on the right path to help us find this mega phantom steady load…

Cheers !

[pswired]

@JGC When you turn off all breakers other than the one feeding the Sense monitor, and look at your realtime power meter (not the always-on “device”) what do you see? This is the number you need to be tracking to solve the problem you describe. Forget about always on for now.

[JGC]

Hi pswired,

This is the next thing I’ll do when I am back there…

From all the postings I now understand the latency response of Always ON when you close a breaker.

This is what I want from Sense; to help me find rogue wattage consumption !

Cheers ! JG

[kevin1]

We’re all rooting for you… Keep filling us in on your search