Sense detected a Heat 1 that only comes on for 1 minute roughly every hour but occasionally goes silent for more than 5 hours. Is this the defroster in one of my fridges?
No I don’t think that the defroster. Mine runs once every 24 hours for 37 minutes. 19 of those minutes it uses a full 500 watts, then drops down to 315 for the rest of the time.
Thanks Brian, I’ll keep looking. I should add that the signature occasionally levels off at exactly 259 watts for longer periods but never more than 25 minutes.
It could be a defective or malfunctioning defroster. Unlikely but possible.
It may not be a heating device at all.
Sense will determine devices inaccurately sometimes where a pump will be identified as a heat device.
Look at the graph at the finest detail and see if there is a spike when it starts. If there is, it likely is not resistance heating.
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That kinda looks like my condensate pump, but much higher wattage. Do you have a sump pump? Someone may have posted screenshots of that in the forum for you to check out. Or when Sense found my circulator pump, I just looked at the side of the unit itself to find it’s wattage. Here are screenshots of my condensate pump.
My bet is on the ice maker in your freezer. It has a heating element that runs for a short time before dumping the ice. Here’s a thread I made almost a year ago now. It was only like 4 days after installing my Sense so I knew a lot less of how it worked than I do now. I wish I could rename the thread to something more useful.
EDIT: Actually I see you say it can stay on for as long as 25 minutes, so if that’s the case I doubt it’s the ice maker. Easy to test though. Does it stop when you turn the ice maker off? 
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Thanks for the responses everyone! I don’t have a sump pump but I do have a pool pump but I currently have it set to run about 7 hours during the day then off and on every few hours overnight to keep the water circulated. The graph doesn’t seem to match up with this though.
As far as the ice maker goes, I’ll have to try turning it off. Could the extended 25 minute cycle be the defrost function of the freezer? Would they use the same heating element? I have a French door fridge with the freezer at the bottom. The ice maker is in the upper left of the fridge area.
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