I’ve been haphazardly reading for forums and been debating getting Sense for quite some time, not sure if it would work assuming my house is quite noisy, with with way to many wall warts in the office and a bunch of battery chargers in my shop.
I finally took the plunge and installed Sense 3 days ago and to my surprise it has already detected 5 devices. So I’d say I’m off to a good start. I think I may have already found ways to save by simply going around and turning thing on and off while watching the meter.
Heat 1, Which I believe may be one of my Aquarium heaters.
AC, we do not have an AC.
Coffee Maker, I think may be another aquarium heater.
Coffee Maker 2, proven to be our kitchen coffee maker.
Fridge, quite possibly but not sure which one.
By no means am I complaining but a couple things I’ve noticed that could make things easier and offer a better experience.
1, In the app “Meter” it shows the devices turning on and off (ex: +xW, Heat 1 +xW, etc…) but on the desktop (web) version it does not. “Show device on timeline” is selected on in the device settings.
2, It would be nice to have an option to “confirm” a device. A simple user confirmed click box in the device settings would be sufficient. Clicking on it would simply change the color of the icon or name on the platform. Could go even further by automatically unchecking the device if Sense modifies the device (name change, merge, etc…), another color for newly discovered devices would be handy too. Nothing too glittery.
I renamed Coffee maker 2, “Coffee maker” using the “Community names” suggestion. Now both devices appear as “Coffee maker” with the only difference being in the device tab I marked one of them in the kitchen. I could go back and rename the one Coffee Maker Coffee Maker 2 or what I think it might be and change it to a guess until I am certain what it is. But it just seems simpler if there was a confirm and/or color change, that wouldn’t potentially have an effect on the “community names” across the platform.
3, On the devices tab it would be helpful if you could select one of the green bars of the usage graph and it would automatically pull up that timeframe on the power meter, instead of having to manually go back to the meter and search for the timeframe the device was active. Especially when trying to narrow down a potential issue with a specific device.
4, I went ahead and entered everything I could find into the “device inventory”, not knowing it apparently doesn’t have any effect on device detection. The complexity of how Sense figures everything out is way out of my league but hopefully this changes sometime down the road, I imagine there has to be a much bigger reason Sense included this.
In the meantime it would be great to be able to select a device from “My Home” and link it to a device found by Sense without having to re-enter all the device make & model information in the “device settings” menu.
It would also be handy to have a way to export “my home” details to print/save for insurance or other purposes should something unfortunate happen.
It minimum it wouldn’t make the “My Home” “device inventory” section feel so useless and seemingly pointless to fill out. Giving users some sort of satisfaction and incentive should Sense use that information more at some point.