As Mike noted in his year-end blog post, one of our big initiatives for 2019 is helping our users save money and energy in their homes. It’s not a new initiative, but we’ll be hitting it with some renewed vigor throughout the year. This was also borne out in a recent survey we conducted with a large sample of our current userbase: energy cost reduction was the number 1 motivation for purchase. We firmly believe that Sense can help.
This is where you come in. Sense provides actionable insights, but the best way to turn these into savings is through effort and engagement. You’ve been great at providing real-life stories on this forum, but we thought a purpose-built platform would bring focus to this single topic and help grow the Sense community. We call it Sense Saves. Rather than focusing on your entire home, Sense Saves is structured so you can submit and search for pointed insights about specific devices or general device categories.
Sense Saves was designed with interaction in mind, to be a sortable and shareable database of user knowledge all focused on one core area: energy cost reduction. By sharing your story, you will empower others to track down similar wasteful devices in their homes. We also think that you’ll also learn more about potential savings to be had in your own home, with your devices.
Submission is easy. Just log in with your Sense account and you’ll be able to both post your stories and comment on other users’ posts. Be sure to add your name and an avatar for the best experience.
Note that Sense Saves is not a replacement for our home here at community.sense.com. This place is not going anywhere and I’ll continue to be your grateful, excited, and (hopefully!) helpful point of contact here. This place is full of deep and insightful conversations that could only happen on an open forum such as this and with a group of enthusiasts such as yourselves. If it’s helpful, think of Sense Saves as a new and improved “Share Your Sense Stories” subforum, but re-designed with features to make the information found there more actionable and simpler to digest for veteran and novice Sense users alike.
I hope to see you all there and can’t wait to read your stories!
And, of course, give us your feedback here in this thread!
I’m unable to access the page. It just does not open. Acts like it could be overloaded with traffic but thought I’d bring it to your attention @RyanAtSense
Sense Saves seems like a natural progression. Good. Makes me think of DoE .gov creating Energy Saver branding … which undoubtedly helps reduce US energy consumption. Which leads me to wonder what a “Sense Saver” branded product would be? My bet would be on devices that combine top Energy Saver ranking plus near-infallible Sense detection. Not that you could expect manufacturers to incorporate Sense-detection hints in their electrical signatures (though why not!) but you could, for example, have simple methods (QR/barcode) to scan-in new devices added to your panel … or add Sense intelligence to online devices/Smart Plugs and so on … regardless, I think the stickers could look cool.
It does feel like a natural progression. Our users want to know how other users are putting Sense to use and this our way of facilitating those conversations.
Is it just stories of people saving? Seems like an effort to communicate the ongoing value of Sense; more of a marketing effort to tell people Sense was worth it than anything else.
Sure it’s great for marketing but there is much more value in it for those of us that already have Sense. I think the number one reason for purchase according to their survey was to save money on energy. Maybe another user shares a story of what they are saving and how they are doing it. Maybe it’s something I can do but didn’t think of. Or I see they replaced an appliance for something newer that is more efficient to run and it shows me how inefficient one or more of my appliances are.
Those are couple of reasons I read the sense saves stories. But even if it’s only purpose was for marketing and it helps to sell more monitors, eventually that’s going to translate into more detections and improved accuracy. Either way, it’s a win!
When using “Sense Saves”, is there any way to expand the “read more” without a redirect? It’s a bit of a hassle not being able to expand stories on the same page and if others are like me, will find it cumbersome to navigate and won’t read as many as they otherwise would if “read more” expanded in and allowed to easily scroll to the next story.
As @samwooly1 noted above, an overwhelming majority of our users and prospective users have expressed a desire to see how others are putting Sense to use. This is our answer to that. Certainly, there is some communication of the “value” of Sense here and thus, yes, it benefits marketing, but ultimately we see this as a better way for users to communicate to other users some of the discrete ways that Sense has helped them. From all the water heater stories we’ve gotten, I got inspired to dig a bit more into my water heater settings and do some experimentation to see if I can eke any more savings out there.
This is definitely something we’d like to do in the future.
I don’t believe that is the case. I believe Sense Saves offers tremendous value to the community of Sense users and isn’t just a marketing tool.
Sense is great at telling you how much energy you are using but information on how to take actions to save energy in your own home, based on your usage, is hard to find. Sense Saves leverages the power of users own experiences to benefit the community.
When I wrote about Sense, along with 2 other home energy monitors, a few months back for Residential Tech Today Magazine (https://restechtoday.com/does-an-energy-monitor-really-add-value-to-a-smart-home/), this was a issue I found with all three energy monitors in the article. I believe that Sense Saves really ups Sense’s game in the value they offer their users.
Sense created a community message board to have its users share ideas with each other for how to save energy because the Sense energy monitor product can’t do any of the basic things mentioned in the users stories. FTFY.
I have a Sense and I love it, but let’s not pretend creating a community message board is some kind of innovation. It doesn’t value add to the energy monitor, since I don’t even need an energy monitor to hear about users who saved money.
We definitely agree on that point