Can anyone help identify this signature?

So I purchased my sense for one reason and I think it already found the culprit, but I can’t! And ideas on this “heat 3”

That’s definitely in the realm of a hot water heater (tank) but the cycle is not necessarily indicative of “normal” hot water usage.

Do you have any baseboard or space heating?

It would be helpful to post the Stats for “heat 3”.

Key to working things out is the Mains Power Meter. “heat 3” is a Sense detection and likely isn’t 100% correct as far as correlating an actual device with “heat 3”. Post the Mains Power Meter for the same time period. Looking at when the detection cycle starts/stops (never/daily/monthly/seasonally) is also, of course, helpful.

Anything above around 1800w (like your signature) is going to have a dual-phase breaker and a dedicated circuit in your electrical panel. These are typically the easiest devices to trace quickly because you can see them toggle on/off if you throw the appropriate breaker in your panel while viewing your usage in the Mains Power Meter or in Settings > Signals. Switching breakers on/off though is not something you really want to do unless you know that the circuits can tolerate it.

At that wattage most breakers are going to feel (literally) warm to the touch when there is a load on them, i.e. when the circuit they are providing juice to is on. Many an electrician has put a thumb to the breaker surface to feel the temperature differences. These days I use a thermal camera for such purposes but a thumb still works. Heating and hot water circuits in winter are particularly easy to “feel”. [Caveat: of course don’t go poking inside an electrical panel unless you know what you are doing]

Guess which circuits are active!

2 Likes

I think I’ll try exactly that today, thank you

I thought at first it might be my hot tub, but I’m pretty sure I found that and the nothing else in the house that could put out that much juice I don’t think. My water heater is an on demand gas heater. Here’s the stats for heat3

(30 x 24 x 60) / 686 ==> on every ~60 minutes.

Yeah, that’s major usage worth identifying ASAP!

1 Like

So I figured out it is indeed the hot tub, maybe the frequency is to to my filter settings I’ll mess with that. But here’s my next question, when I hit the jets a “other” bubble pops up, so is it identifying the heater and the blower separately? I guess that kinda makes “sense” now that I’ve said it :blush:

1 Like

@drewpiercer I also have a hot tub at my house…it has indeed identified my heater separate from the blower motors and has yet to identify the blower motors. I will add that yours is a very frequent cycle in comparison to mine (Jacuzzi J300 series) and is hopefully a setting you can adjust. My heater only runs as needed with a small circulation pump with a daily jet cycle of only about 15 minutes. Other cycle settings are disabled since it isn’t used on a daily basis. Here’s my hot tubs recent heat cycling (I live in upstate NY, hot tub outside on deck with ~40-50F temperatures these last few days):

This is a view of the devices power meter from the Android app…not sure if you can see device power meter from web app…at least I haven’t figured out how.

Hope this helps!

Indeed!

If you had excess solar dumping resistive (or heat pump!) heat into a hot tub then perhaps you might get casual about the lack of insulation in a tub that leads to the need for frequent cycling like that … but with your system @drewpiercer, are you filling the tub with “on demand gas heated water”? Probably not.

Clearly you need some considered crafting there to save some watts. Other energy saving you might do indoors is going to be swamped, at least in winter, by the hot tub.

This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.