Comparison homes subsets

The “compare” view compares me to other homes in Pennsylvania, which takes care of climate. But all-electric homes in PA must be pretty rare. I would really like to know how I compare in that crowd, instead of putting my ground-source heat pump up against everyone else’s oil furnace!

There is no way to do this and I also experience the same issue.

Recent extensive discussion here:

A few of the issues (talked about above to a certain extent):

  • Homes can vary dramatically in size/insulation/aspect/exposure/shadowing etc. That alone is a large multi-dimensional dataset.

  • A ground-source heat pump, for example, is a lot more efficient than electric baseboard heat so you need to compare similar heating/cooling “devices”, not just electric vs oil. This becomes multi-dimensional pretty quickly especially because many homes will have a mix of systems.

  • A less obvious factor, somewhat based on the first two issues, is “what does compare really mean?”. Meaning: Let’s say you see that you are in the bottom 10% of usage. Great. But you have a GSHP so you should be. OK. Ignoring house size and whatnot, then your goal might be to get to the bottom 5% of usage whereas if you knew you had a big house (relatively) then you might be dis-incentivized to even try.

Takeaway: Compare only works when you define precisely what it means and defining that in sufficient detail in the Sense world is a task of similar scale to electrical device disaggregation!

I am going toss another monkey into this mess. I live in a 2800sq/ft home; but the ceilings are at minimum 12ft. In reality I wish we could use cubic volume to define a “comparison home”. My HVAC usage is much higher than a typical rancher.

So ok, it’s complicated, but I was assuming Sense has access to the information we fill out in Settings: my home. Not to use the ML, but just the self-reported information. Alternatively, perhaps there’s a better way to present the Compare statistics so they are more informative? Requires some thought.