Um, California time must be different than NH time. We have 86,400 seconds in a day here.
yep… my math was wrong… sorry, it was late at night… lol we have 86400 seconds also…
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@dougmarino I do understand, LG makes a lot of things out there, but in all fairness, I don’t have a single LG device in my home…
when you talk with support, be sure to ask them if your data shows good wifi connectivity, and ask if your data shows a noisy AC line… AC line noise messes up the detection ability and your wifi connectivity is of course the lifeblood of your system’s communications…
hang in there… also remember that this is a very new technology and there are a lot of changes coming as this develops… if you can stick it out, this will work very well…
I’ve had Sense for 7 months now. I installed it when we put in solar. It’s been useful to show total energy used and total energy produced (solar) per time period but that’s it. It’s detected devices but it’s unclear that they are correct. I wish there was a way where I could train/verify it by turning a device on/off and letting it tell me which device it was. It created 10 heat devices and it’s unclear which is which. I really would like to know what my HVAC is using. I have 2 American Standard gas furnaces (2 stage w/variable fan) and 2 heat pumps (variable, communicating). Also, I wish Sense would put a list of manufacturers to choose from instead of a blank text field. I also wish they would work with us consumers to fix the product. I’m in Massachusetts about 35 minutes from Sense, Inc. They could come here and diagnose it. It would be worth everyone’s time.
We do too! But, it’s just not that simple. I recommend reading this: Why can't you train Sense?
It can take a bit of user effort to ID devices when you get generic duplicates like that. I’d suggest making use of the community names and setting up some custom notifications so you can check out the power meter and narrow down from there. I recently have a bunch of heat devices pop up over two days and it turns out they were all related to my stove/oven. As for why I had 7 heat devices in my in 4-burner stove, I’m not too sure, but some investigation with custom notifications and the power meter helped me figure it out and then I merged them into a single stove device.
That would be a very, very, very long list if we tried to be exhaustive (every mfr ever for every consumer device out there…yikes) and would have to be constantly updated. That said, I do think there could be some autofill capabilities based on what other users have put prior. I’ll pass that along to the team.
Unfortunately, things just aren’t that simple with machine learning. One house doesn’t map so simply to the Sense userbase at large. Most of us here have Sense in our homes and we all suffer from the same device detection frustrations. If I could just knock on my data scientist neighbor’s desk and get my hot water heater detected, I’d be so happy. Alas, I cannot. There just aren’t simple pushbutton fixes here. Sense is a learning device and it needs to learn. You can help Sense learn by making use of Community Names, filling in Make/Model info, turning on Network Identification, and making use of smart plugs for your tough-to-track 120V devices.
In any case, we like meeting our users. I hosted a local user meetup last year. I’ll have to do another one soon nd we can get you in here to meet the team.
Depending on your stove each burner can have multiple elements and let’s not forget the Oven elements either 
My current stove (glas top induction) has 2 burners that have a Hi/Lo side of the control knob, which for the Lo side only turn on the inner ring of the “burner” and on the Hi side turn on both the inner & outer ring of the burner. Other stoves have multi-stage heaters where if for example your knob goes from 0-10, 0-5 is 1 stage and 6-10 is a 2nd stage within the heating element to turn on.
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Is there anything I can do to help device discovery?
I still have 0 devices and “Other” as the only load.
All switches in the house are Z-wave. It would be great for sense to listen to Zwave messaging and realize when lights are turned on/off, but I’m guessing it doesn’t have the capabilities
Have you reached out to support?
No Zwave communication hardware in the Sense monitor, today. But can communicate with several brands of WiFi smartplugs plus Hue bridges. Right now, the focus is on devices that provide power/energy usage feedback (ground truth), not just on/off.
How long have you had Sense installed? If it’s been longer than a couple of weeks, you should reach out to Support as this sounds like it could be installation related.
I need a way to VERIFY that the device detected is the actual device that I think it is. Surely, this can be done by asking the user to manually turn the device on/off and matching it with what it thinks it is.
there are ways to verify, but sometimes you have to think outside the box… for devices like stoves and washers/dryers, you can simply have the app open, go over to the device, turn it on/off a couple of times (giving it a few seconds to react on Sense) and figure it out… for stages that may be part of a device, you have to get creative… for example: my frig has an ice maker that dumps into a tray in the door… for something like that, there is no on/off switch to use, so I chose a day where the ice maker hadn’t normally been running and I emptied the bin… that night and through the next morning, it ran consistently every hour… I considered that solved… another example: I have a frig and separate chest freezer… I had a detected device that was a frig or freezer, so I needed to figure out which one it was… so I turned on the push notifications in the app to be notified when device turned on and off… over the next few day, when I was home and got an “on” notice, I would go over to the frig and freezer and see which one was running and likewise, check when I would get an “off” notice… that helped narrow it down…
trickier items like heat pumps or multi-stage air conditioners can have as many as 5 stages… furnaces can have as many as 2 stages… there are even parts of the country that use strip heaters and each of those could come up individually… my ice maker heater was detected early on, but I have yet to see my frig or any of its cycles… none of my TVs have been detected… haven’t had any network devices detected… so I do understand your frustration…
I’ve had my Sense for 2 months… although after month created my own issues, but installing a whole house surge protector and changed the Sense setup (moved some wires around for better fitment)… that threw my numbers into negatives, because I didn’t get everything back the way it was, so under advise from support, I reset my data… that put my unit to start over from the beginning… it happens…
from the initial install, I had to get support to force its first firmware update, force the initial line check, and force the solar calibration… since the data reset, it completed all that it needed without any force from support and its actually been detecting devices faster than before… I don’t know if its directly connected to my surge protector, or the better wiring setup/install that I changed… but either way, its been a better start now than before… so we’ll see how it goes…
Very helpful
So almost 8 months after my original post that started this thread I thought I’d update on my experience and what has (or has not) changed or improved since the installation in May, 2018.
- By September, Sense had never discovered the indoor air handler for my heat pump. Since I live in Florida, this thing runs all the time but was never discovered. Then in late September the old unit gave up the ghost and had to be replaced with a new one. That new unit was installed in late September but has still not been discovered by Sense 5 months later. The unit runs all the time due to the climate here but no luck on the discovery. Because of the way my house is wired, Sense will never see the outdoor compressor until I can have 2 Sense in the same account.
- While it discovered my garage fridge (14 years old) within days of installation, it never found the primary kitchen fridge (3-1/2 years old).
- It has only discovered 1 of 4 TV’s in the house. The one discovered is a Samsung that is not on a UPS but none of the Sony TV’s that are connected to UPS have been discovered despite all TV’s being network connected.
- I set up the Hue integration and all of those devices ‘appear’ to be recording correctly. I had one multi-bulb light bar in the bathroom discovered but no other light fixture or bulb that is not a Hue has been discovered.
- Not a single ceiling fan has been discovered despite the fact that there is at least one running nearly whenever I’m at home.
- It found the microwave but seems to actually only record about 50% of actual use. If I run 2 separate cycles back-to-back it records the first one as Microwave, but it typically shows up as ‘other’ on the second one.
- It has still not found the washer, dishwasher, stove or toaster oven.
- It thought it might have found the dryer last week but seems to regulary mix that up with the Hot water heater so I’m not confident it’s not just a guess.
- My Always On was continually running extremely high and between that and Other being a black hole representing 70%+ of my total usage I bought a couple of the TPLink smart outlets for key areas like my Internet core, Home Theater , iMac and main refrigerator. That at least broke out some clusters of devices but as I understand it once I put things behind that outlet Sense will never figure out the individual devices so I get a little knowledge of clusters of devices I’ll never get device specific details on all those devices behind the TPLink; especially since with the exception of the fridge what’s actually plugged into the TPLink is a UPS. All I basically did was create smaller clusters of Always On and Other vs one large blob.
I opened a support case on October 5, 2018 and on December 5, 2018 received this response:
“I do apologize for the long resolution time on this. This is a medium priority bug, however, I can give you a rough estimate of the end of January for the fix to be pushed. I will keep you updated if things change by that time.”
I’ve received no updates at all on the ticket since then and it is now JAN 27, 2019.
It’s now the end of January and nothing is changing so I guess unless I keep spending more and more money on other tools to break things down via the smart outlets it’s just not going to get any better for me. I might as well just use the SmartOutlets then. It’s really disappointing that my experience has been so poor and Sense doesn’t consider this to be a priority for resolution.
With 16 detections in less than 2 weeks since install, I feel extremely
fortunate. Four just yesterday. I’v tried to think of reasons my results
are so good and I have a couple of ideas. The first is living life as if no
sense monitor is connected so it doesn’t disturb or really “slow” the flow
of data.
But now I’m thinking something else might be contributing. I’m not exactly
sure if has anything to do with it but I don’t currently use a dedicated breaker for
the sense. I have it double tapped to my water heater breaker. I plan on changing
it but for right now and while it’s going so well. I will leave it be. They used to make
breakers made for double tap with 2 screws on each leg. I will be searching for one
if they still make them because I wonder if the sense is somehow pulling data from what
we believe is exclusively powering the device.
I say that because the multimeter I have has a single clamp like the Ct clamps
but is a wire with either a probe or alligator clip at the other side. If this meter is coming up with
readings this way then why wouldn’t the sense? Could it be measuring fluctuations
from clamp to breaker wire? Does it only take measurements between clamps?
@samwooly1 I can verify that Sense uses both the CT clamps and the power leads are used for readings… when I installed my whole house surge protector, I moved wires around for better organization in the breaker box… I’m pretty sure that’s where I didn’t get things back the way they were… CTs where not removed from their positions, I unplugged from the Sense monitor and rerouted, I did remove power wires from breaker… anyway, after that, I was getting negative numbers everywhere… I tried to put it the other way, didn’t help… the bottom line was that I’d already messed up the way Sense was viewing my home… after opening a ticket, and msgs back and forth for a few days, support and I both had agreed that my data was so screwed up that resetting data was the best option… since the negative numbers being stored in my data had messed up some of the signatures in my data… since the reset, all has been good… but I haven’t tried changing anything else either… I plan on leaving it alone…
I checked into this and the bug you logged about TVs is being looked into still. These timelines are always estimates. There’s just no way to know how long a bug fix will take in advance.
That is actually MUCH better than my personal experience. After two years still no fridge, and water heater took half a year. First several months nothing.
Of course, two years later Sense has improved significantly, so your experience may continue to get better.
Very interesting theory. I have a Sense installation at home, with the Sense on a dedicated breaker. Only 12 detections in 8 months including 2 detections this past Saturday). Contrast this with a Sense installation in our business office (on an ‘unsupported’ 3 phase feed) on a shared breaker. This installation has 21 detections in about half the time.
That is very interesting.
It would be interesting to know how many others are using the
shared breaker setup. Looks like I just lost my water heater, I
put up a question under technical about it, bummer.