Hi all, My name is Greg and I’m new to the Sence community. That being the case, I have question about a motor device that was discovered by my monitor this week. Here is my question. Has anyone ran across a discovered motor device that randomly turns on and off every couple of hours for just one second. Sometimes when this motor device comes on it draws exactly 707 watts for that one second, and sometimes it draws exactly 449 watts for a second.
Any advise on how to track down and find out what this motor device is?
In advance, thanks.
1 Like
Do you have a laser printer?
Mine identified as an unnamed motor of 767 watts that turned on every so often for a brief time.
2 Likes
Yes I have a laser printer, so I turned that off and the issue still occurs. I’m starting to turn off devices one at at time that have motors, like my stand-up freezers, furnace, hot tub, etc.in order to try and isolate the device that causing the problem. I assume this is going to be a boring time consuming task, like watching paint dry.
1 Like
This afternoon I was able to locate the root cause of the issue. My new GE Profile refrigerator is the culprit. It appears when the compressor comes on, Sense notices a 707 watt spike and reports that as motor turned on for one second, then reports motor turned off for one second. I guess the question now, is this a normal occurrence or do I have a problem with my new GE Profile refrigerator. Has anyone seen or had this type of issue? I hate to place a service call for the refrigerator if this is a normal condition. On the other hand if this is normal, its going to be a pain seeing this notification pop up on my app every couple of hours when the compressor comes on. Does anyone have some advise, or recommendation.
Refrigerators have been around for 100 years longer than Sense. I wouldn’t be concerned about it. Most compressors require a capacitor to get the motor spinning initially. This is the spike you see. After that, the wattage will be significantly less. Depending upon what drives the compressor, the wattage may be so low that Sense can’t yet detect it. My older fridge and freezer have a significant spike when the compressor kicks in. After that, they settle in round 120 watts. My GE profile refrigerator has a PWM controlled compressor which uses very little power and actually runs for a long time at a very slow speed It barely shows up as a blip in Sense and Sense hasn’t been able to discover it yet.
Sounds good. That being the case, is there any way sense can disregard this motor on / off to prevent the bubble and message from appearing each time it occurs?
My Sense has figured out my slightly older 18cu Whirlpool W9RXXMFWG00 but not my newer Whirlpool WRF989SDAH02 which also has the longer running lower speed compressor.
You can edit the device in the app to disable the message.
To All. Thanks for the feed back. I’m having other issues with my stand up freezer that sense shows inaccurate information that results in useless notifications.Tech support seems to be unhelpful, and I’m not happy with their generic cookie cutter response. There always seems to be a bug or pending fix that they are working on that’s causing my issues. At this point I think sense needs to get their act together fix the bugs, and map my appliances correctly just like their sales promotion advertisement shows. I purchased sense because I saw the promotion advertisement that shows a home owner being able to know when the TV is on, and for how long. The same goes for other large appliances, as well some small appliances like a blow dryer, curling-iron, gaming system, coffee pot, toaster oven, etc. As of today, my sense monitor has not discovered any of those items let alone tell me about them.
I’m willing to give tech support a little more time to resolve my issues and for my sense monitor to discover more devices, then after that my next set of e-mails are going directly to sense management.
Can you post some screen shots of ~12hr usage graphs from your app, and if possible a good shot of your panel so we can see your installation? Also an image of your settings - sense monitor page?
From the sounds of it, you may have an installation issue.
Nick. I’m not sure on how to save and send screen snap shots. When my son gets back from his business trip next week I will have him take them, and send them over. In regards to installation. I assume it’s correct, there are two CT’s. one installed around main incoming phase A wire and one installed around main incoming phase B wire.The 220 volt sense power wires are connected onto a two pole circuit breaker.
If you think it helps we can get and send a picture of the install. Question: How come tech support has not asked me for this information. Reading your posts It seems you are more knowledgeable and helpful then the tech support team. Thanks for your help, I will send over the screen snap shots and panel install picture when my son gets back from his business trip.
One big reason tech support hasn’t asked is that they can see all of your data and presumably have some idea of whether it looks like good data or not 
I also asked for a picture of your install because sometimes we might be able to pick up on errors like using the wrong style of breaker or accidental inclusion of errant wires in the CT clamp (both of which I’ve seen). Never know, it’s easier than trying to speculate
Last, I don’t know how long you’ve been up and running, but in 3+ months I’m on about 20 devices more or less accurately identified. Things have been moving at different speeds for different users, and there may be complicating factors like age or size of the home and complexity of the appliances. My house is a modest size with simple appliances for the most part, so that may be making identification easier in my case - though still somewhat slow. As Sense’s model base grows, new customers in the future will probably be seeing faster results than us early adopters
Ben . If you are monitoring these posts for feed back tech support still has not corrected my issues with freezer / refrigerator devices having inaccurate information. I know you keep telling everyone that have tech support issues to deal directly with them, but if they are not resolving our issuses you should be aware of that. Once again I got to tell you this is very frustrating. Senior management of sense needs to be informed of these on going unresolved issues, so please let them know.
Thanks.
Ben. Tech support responded to my to my freezer and refrigerator issues. The response was, We have escalated the issue with two devices in question to data science.
OK, what exactly does that response mean to me? Is there going to be a turn around time frame on this? Is tech support or the data science team going to respond back to me with the solution? I hope my devices in question are not going into a black hole. Point being, tech support response is always very vague and lacking details. I have seen other sense users and customers complain about the same thing of vagueness, and lack of details from the tech support team.I know you are looking for customer feed back, so here is some feed back. Tech support should respond to customers / users issues and problems with more details and clarification.
Thanks, hopefully this feed back results to a better sense product, and better customer relations.