Can Someone Identify this signature?

So even with the device, Keurig, OFF, it will still try to maintain some water temperature?

I will unplug it and see what happens.

Should be interesting - please post results. @samwooly1 noted below that his Keurig with a timer, still kept the standby heater going, even when the “timer” was off.

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I was shocked by what I read on this thread and the Keurig web site discussion of power consumption, so I hauled out my trusty Kill-a-Watt.

Also, different models (we have two) seem to have very different behavior.

Keurig VUE Coffee Maker

“Off” it draws 57 watts (Yikes!) continuously

Heating up it draws 1150 watts, then cycles from about 60 watts to about 700 watts while maintaining temperature.

In our home, with recent turn on, it cycles about every half minute or so.

Keurig K-Café Single Serve Coffee, Latte & Cappuccino Maker

“Off” it draws 0.8 watts continuously

Heating up it draws 1260 watts, then cycles from about 5 watts to around 275 watts

Cycle time seems to be a couple of minutes, with quite short peaks.

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IMHO Keurigs may deserve a negative Energy Star rating in general.

Energy Black Holes?

There are better ways to do the “keep warm” thing, the keys being insulation and temperature adjustment.

I posted this before but the Zojirushi Micom specs are interesting to reference again:

Notice the capacity is 4 liters so a fair comparison needs to account for that.

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I started unplugging/Turing off circuit breakers. Here you go - IT IS NOT:

Keurig
Water heater
Cable box
Washer
Dryer

Going for the hot water heater next.

OK, at this point it’s probably helpful if you post some more zoomed out images of the Mains Power Meter. 12-24hrs, that kind of scale … so those 200+W cycles are visible above the background.

Eventually, of course, it’s important to determine the daily (and longer) cycles unless the device/component cycle is really showing 24/7/365.

FOUND IT!

It is coming from a Whirlpool Water dispenser. It dispenses cold and hot water.

We unplugged it and the signature went away.

Time to investigate a little further. I will go to the Whirlpool site and see if I can find anything on it.

Thank you all!

Bob

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Sounds like a secondary element to keep water hot, just like a Keurig or similar coffee maker.
Does this dispenser have another primary element that comes on while actually dispensing?
The signature shown doesn’t appear to have enough wattage to initially heat water.
When your sure this is the culprit, please add to the library.

That would actually be a great device to see “ground truth” on via a smart plug.

Would be helpful to all if you could put it on an HS110 and post some screenshots.

We can create an entry in the Community Device Library to aid in future human detection … and even, perhaps, Sense will beat us next time.

Hot! Or should I say cool!

For reference, @kevin1 posted this recently. Obviously no cooling cycle fun.

Note that the Zojirushi and @kevin1’s InSinkErator are doing the initial heat cycle in the 700W realm. Keeping a larger volume of water hot, “a big kettle”, is most efficiently done with a kind of mid-range element I suppose. Half way between a Keurig keep-warm and a regular kettle that aims for maximum speed.

So, I don’t expect we’re necessarily looking for a 1,500W heat cycle from a primary element.

Great catch. If you can attach a screenshot of the daily usage in the Power Meter, and supply the specs and model # from Whirlpool we can add it to the Community Device Library.

Community Device Library? Where do I see that?

And the dispenser is just simple “water cooler.” 5 gallon bottle on top. It is gravity fed when dispensing so the only time it is “on,” is when it is heating or cooling. And it cools the water a lot more than it heats the water. It cools the water down to about 41º (F) and heats it to around 183º.

I am not very technical with this stuff. So if anyone wold like to explain to me how to do more with signatures, etc., I am always willing to learn.

Thanks!

The Community Device Library is a category in the forum and you’ll find entries in the links that both @kevin1 and I posted above.

If you search the forum you can also narrow down the search to that Community Device Library category. e.g. search “fridge” and select the Community Device Library.

Your device is interesting because it both heats and cools, and mostly at the whim of somewhat random usage on your part. It’s like a combination of a kettle and a mini-fridge. This is a challenge for Sense to natively detect “as a single device” because despite the energy flow going through to the one circuit the water dispenser is plugged into, the heating and cooling components are activating at various times in different modes. Sense could well, eventually, tell you it found a kettle and a fridge.

I suspect it will be quite difficult to fully identify all the waveform only associated with this without using a smart plug like an Kasa HS110. Do you have one or can you get one and dedicate it to the water dispenser?

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I wonder if this component both heats and cools at the same time.
Think of how a heat pump works. If you had a coil in one compartment and the other coil in another, you could hear and coil at the same time depending on the flow of Freon.

It does heat and cool independently.

For that reason I’ve been waiting for hot-water-dispenser-integrated fridges to become the norm!

In the absence of some solid smart plug data or a circuit diagram , perhaps the repair manual would reveal something like a heating element replacement part.

The Mains Power Meter signatures are perhaps indicative of something more complicated (simpler!) than compressor + resistive element.

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So I went hunting for information on the Whirlpool water cooler. I will share it here and perhaps some of you more technical Sense users can look at it and post more information in the Community Device Library?

I have not found more technical data but I am still looking.

The manual was of no help:

http://www.whirlpoolwatercoolers.com/fileuploader/download/download/?d=0&file=custom%2Fupload%2FFile-1452916970.pdf

Just want to thank you all again. It has been a learning experience.

Bob

Good stuff. Thanks for posting the info.

Well, from this you can already see that there’s nothing particularly magical in the way it’s heating/cooling and every indication that it wastes potential energy.

“Hot Water Power” = 650W would indicate it has a 650W heating element … which would also keep the water at temperature. Unlike the smaller wattage “keep warm” elements found on Keurigs and coffee makers, this one is having to heat reasonably quickly when you dispense hot water and then the hot reservoir is replenished. There’s a mini-kettle in there somewhere. “1.3G/hr>176F” is easy to do calculations for and correlate with 650W but I will spare you the calculation!

“Max cold water power <100W” + the obvious refrigerant coil in the diagram is a clear indication of a pretty normal “mini fridge” type of cooling. Heat is extracted via a small compressor and dissipated from that coil at the back of the unit. The coil is plainly visible here, just like the back of a fridge.

Screen Shot 2020-03-07 at 11.03.16 AM

So, despite @samwooly1’s hopes (and mine) it looks like the unit isn’t taking that heat from cooling the water and using it to heat the water. It’s not quite as simple (on a small scale) to do that efficiently as one might think BUT the easy thing to do with the design would be to route the bottled water reservoir feed to the water heating element via the refrigerant coil to pre-heat the water. At the small usage scale I doubt that makes sense because of increased device complexity and failure points. We are in the 21st Century though!

Conclusion:

  • Hot water: you’re looking for periodic use (in the waveform) of a 650W resistive element. A sudden on for a number of seconds/minutes depending upon hot water usage.

  • Cold water: Water is kept cold by periodic activation of a <100W compressor/pump.

Still would love to see this on an HS110 and I think Sense would be interested in this type of device because of the component challenges. At what point, for example, do you or Sense merge a “650W Kettle” device with a “Mini-fridge”, as found by Sense, into a “Hot/cold Water Dispenser”?.

Anybody else have one? Need more data!

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Added to the library, here:

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