I agree and have found a way to access some of that historical data. You can use their undocumented API to gain access to the data which is returned based on granularity (Seconds, minutes, days etc). I can explain more if interested, but I created an ETL that will take the daily data and store it in my analytics data warehouse (Domo) where I can further work with the data.
not perfect for me either, but I’m not doing too badly. the last 3 things that really needed detecting were the fan in my dehumidifie, Air Conditioner, and the microwave. The Dehumidifier fan was recently detected, so was the microwave, and the Air Conditioning (detected yesterday) was just waiting to be used.
from here on out, it will be little things. my tea pot (which I rarely use do to my schedule), and my coffee maker (which I never use… don’t care for coffee). perhaps the light in my fridge(?), maybe the tumbler in my gas dryer.
I can’t think of anything else that sense could reliably detect. at least until it detects my smart tv or something. I have yet to see it use the network information it is watching for detecting anything. I check to make sure the setting is on, but it is and I have the tv plugged into a power supply (with the rest of router, modem, etc.) and then into a kill-a-watt, anyway. the kill-a-watt beeps whenever I turn on the tube. I don’t know… maybe.
I keep my dehumidifier parts separate because it is more interesting to me that way.
BlockquoteJust to chime in a little - I reset mine after hanging on to hope that things would get better after 14 months… it didn’t. It’s exactly the same after 3 months. What’s weird is that my EV was finally re-sensed a few days ago - but then it showed data for that three months in my overview sections. That had never happened with other devices before. Some things it had sensed prior to my reset still haven’t come back. It’s still disappointing. I still don’t look at it until I get some e-mail or notification from these forums as a reminder that I have a little orange brick hanging out in my basement. Dumb things like a brownout or a quick half second power outage throwing the Sense offline even though it’s powered back on is still annoying.
I’ve stopped recommending it to anybody. I haven’t seen any solid device detection improvements since I installed in October of 2016.
Wow, just wow.
We are taking delivery of a Chevy Bolt and are hoping sense will sense it. So far devices have been slowly and inaccurately detected. The entire process has been disappointing. I have a TED 5000 as a legacy device and to be honest, it is more basic, but always did what it promised.
Yup, and after 15 months I’ve given up too. Waste of time, effort, and $.
Kevin5 please disregard the trolls, some people on here are full of negativity. Most users have had a good experience and sense support is very responsive to issues.
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Perhaps some of the trolls would be less negative if their investment actually worked. For some portion of the “customers” (e.g. guinea pigs), it hasn’t.
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Kevin5 like any other product out there, you are going to have 5 star reviews, 1 star reviews, and reviews everywhere in between. I don’t think it is fair to call a 1 star reviewer a troll if the product didn’t work for him. But we should still remember that there are many users that are having positive experiences with the product. Not perfect, but positive.
the world is dynamic, and for various reasons, even a great product is not going to work for everyone. and for various reasons, even a terrible product is not going to fail for everyone.
If we take Sense’s reviews on Amazon as one data point, 66% are 5 star, 16% are 4 star, 7% are 3 star, 4% are 2 star, and 7% are 1 star. So, it seems to be acceptable for a significant portion of those who bought thru Amazon and rated it there. That’s pretty good overall.
Unfortunately, for others of us it’s a zero (or less) star. Recently Sense support told me that they will not be able to make it work in my home in the foreseeable future…due to my Franklin Electric constant pressure well pump, so I’m giving up and I am no longer a customer. Best of luck to all those of you hanging in there.
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yeah. I guess I would put myself in the the 3 star category. perhaps 3.5.
I say this because of the frequent gaps that occur in the history. sometimes up to 2 hours at a time. they do get filled in eventually, but it is past the time that I am interested in what happened in the gap. also its tendency to mix up the appliances it has discovered.
I do think 2 months is not long enough to evaluate the product. because I do think how well it works does depend on the appliance and the wiring of the house. and so it may not even be the device. but it is the kind of thing that should be returnable if the problem is the device or incompatibility.
if nothing else though, at least it is a very expensive smart electric meter… not a complete paperweight. Nice that I can track my electric bill through out the month without going outside and reading the meter everyday.
What would be nice, is if we could set it to notify us of significant power fluctuations (we could define what significant is). so at least we could know if something is running that uses a lot of power.
I’ve already had a “smart electric meter” (www.welserver.com) for almost a decade. It’s VERY accurate and almost all of my big consumers are wired into the WelServer system, providing power consumption and solar generation for the whole house, plus on/off information for dozens of individual devices/systems.
The reason I bought Sense was to learn what the power consumption was for individual devices. At last count, we have over 100 of those, and in 15 months Sense has (inaccurately) found less than 10. According to their marketing, it should be able to tell me about things right down to lighting left on and garage door openers. HA! Larger consumers like washer/dryer, stove/oven, large computer center, deep well, etc were supposed to be a slam dunk.
Unfortunately, Sense hasn’t been able to provide accurate data for much of anything, even power devices it’s recognized often get dumped elsewhere, so I gave up
lucky you. I live in a backwards state ;). do smart meters give you the ability to monitor usage on your phone? so for me then, and not you, it is at least useful for that.
I agree with you. It doesn’t work for you. I’m having mild success. all of my major appliances have been detected. I doubt it will discover my lights because the only ones that use significant power are the kitchen and living room. and the living room, I can control which of the 20 cans turn on via twelve switches. so my lighting is too varied.
If you are giving up, perhaps you could get your money on ebay, or just leave it running in the background. Stop taking an active interest. Forget about it and check in on it every so often and see. maybe after two years, you’ll remember you have it installed and check on it, and you might find a host of things detected.
I would put my experience at a 3 out of 5. It’s giving me a high level of what I want to know, of course I’m expecting more devices to be found, but to me that’s the nature of big data, in order for big data to work, you have to have more data, etc. I’m just hoping they can empower us more to help them with the identification. Somehow if we all filed out a profile of what our device use looked like, they should be able to see patterns in people’s data. At the same time, they should give us back an analysis to tell us what they think they are finding and let us double confirm if our answers were correct, etc. This just sitting around and not being able to do more to help is what’s frustrating, etc.
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that’s exactly what I said in a different thread.
maybe identifying our own devices is impractical. But identifying devices and then sending that data to the engineers could be useful as they develop models. rather than waiting for Sense to take 2 months to recognize that a very consistent pattern of on and off was a certain appliance. I could have pointed at the start and end of a cycle, labeled it, and sent it in.
I understand that, like voice recognition and photo recognition, it is difficult for a computer to recognize patterns as easily as our brains do. But surely input like that can’t be useless?
Entergy engineers tell me that we’ll have smart meters beginning in 2019. They got a grant for the upgrade.
I looked it up and I think Entergy is going to start rolling them out in the near future in New Orleans… But who knows when that is going to be, lol. And I’ll probably be the last to get one.
edit: looked it up. will start rolling them out in 2019 and expects completion in 2021… but you know how it is.
Westheimer’s rule
“To estimate the time it takes to do a task: estimate the time you think it should take, multiply by two and change the unit of measure to the next highest unit. Thus, we allocate two days for a one hour task.”
so three years. double it: 6 years. next highest unit: 6 decades. sounds about right 
“backwards”, compared to NH? Really? YIKES! Didn’t know that was possible.
The welserver product provides accurate info, both for use and solar generation. In addition, the folks at Enphase provide accurate generation monitoring.
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Sorry to see you go Andy – you’ve been providing the same type of feedback I would have given.
After ~15 months I have 27 devices detected… out of more than 150 distinct electric loads in our home.
Sense has yet to consistently identify my pool pump, which is particularly vexing as it is an energy hog and it’s hard wired so I can’t measure it with a killawatt meter. It also has never identified our two EV chargers, but at least in those cases I have them sub-metered.
As for the 27 devices:
(1) the times I have checked, the Sense energy consumption figures (in kWh) do not match a killawatt meter reading: they are usually too low. Perhaps because Sense is missing the “off” signal on long running devices as has been mentioned in other threads.
(2) It’s very difficult to associate “component” energy use with the whole appliance: there are still several devices which I’ve been unable to identify; and
(3) It misses episodes of use!
My recommendations to Sense would be to tone down the marketing (my expectations were clearly too high), call the product a “beta” version, and figure out why some homes (like mine and Andy’s) do so poorly – and then note this distinction in your outreach (ymmv).
I also have a Rainforest EMU connected to my PG&E Smart Meter and frankly it was a much smarter purchase than Sense: it’s pretty easy to walk around and turn things on & off and see the associated change.
Of course I can do this with Sense too, but the ads claimed much more than this, and it was 4x the cost. 
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I have a Rainforest Eagle, as well as the Sense, and I find the Sense to be far more useful, partially due to deficiencies in the Eagle (Emu may be different)
- only provides net meter reading - Sense breaks out solar vs. whole house usage
- time resolution and UI - Eagle only updates every few seconds and graphs are slow to generate, with no real time graphing.
Plus Sense offers much more analysis, things like Always On and identification, even if it doesn’t meet the promise of it’s marketing.
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I don’t have a whole lot of faith and hope in the device detection. as I posted in my own thread, Sense detected a nonexistant AC3 which has completely messed up my AC detection and displayed usage of devices (they all add up to a number that doesn’t reflect the actual number in the graph. which I trust).
the realtime meter reading or whatever you call it, is the major selling point to me. because while Sense may not be able to figure out a device, I can. The human brain is so much smarter than a computer when it comes to finding patterns.
From language, faces, to finding distant planets in a sea of data, something that was outsourced to public volunteers because only human eyes could do it.
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I deleted my AC. It was just completely messed up after Sense decided it had to create a new AC to replace the old one. and Sense couldn’t figure out how much was the dehumidifier, the AC, and other.
I deleted the AC. in this New Orleans heat, it will not take Sense long to rediscover it. as for now, my dehumidifier and all else is once again being detected properly. peace and order are restored.