Funny… Sense seems to think everything is my coffee maker… Including my coffee maker (which is a nice bonus I suppose)…
My toaster oven is my coffee maker… My rice cooker is my coffee maker… So is my Instant Pot…
I try and catch them when they are being detected incorrectly and letting Sense know “device isn’t on”…
For some reason (a little off topic)…I have a custom notification to let me know when my freezer or refrigerator light is on for more than 2 minutes to warm me if either door is left ajar… My 2 minute alerts were going off like crazy last night… I ran to my fridge…nope, but doors closed… LOL…
Still too early. After 9 months, finally picked up my rice cooker. I replaced my kettle twice because the cheap ones were rusting. So I had to delete them. Now it’s confused with my toaster oven. But I’ve learned to be patient.
I had a similar issue with my hot water kettle, @MikeekiM. I don’t have a traditional coffee maker (I typically go with a french press), but early on I had the kettle conflate with my slowcooker and toaster.
To make this a little easier for me personally, I have a Belkin insight plug I have in a static outlet on my counter.
Since the other devices (slowcooker and toaster) are not plugged in 24/7, I typically plug them into the “kitchen plug” whenever they’re being used. Not the solution you may be looking for, but might be worth sharing if you have an extra smart plug laying around. In some good news, this should get better with time and with more usage/run cycles of these devices. Down the line, I might suggest deleting the coffee maker device if it keeps on conflating with the other similar heating devices in your kitchen.
Unfortunately, all the devices you’ve listed look very similar from an electrical perspective. Take a look at the Sense realtime power meter graph next time you’re using one, and compare the charts. You’ll see a similar wattage and pattern.
One way Sense can differentiate is if the devices are on different power legs in your electric panel. So if your coffee maker can easily be moved to an outlet on a different circuit, it might end up on the other power leg, in which case Sense won’t confuse it with the other things on the different leg. But that’s not always practical, and at best it gives you two different Sense devices.
As @pswired suggested a different phase would likely help your situation. I recently swapped my refrigerator over onto the opposite phase by swapping position of the breaker with the one directly above it.
If you are not an electrician I would suggest calling one for this easy and quick procedure. It shouldn’t cost too much if you were to call. Likely a flat service call charge.
My toaster oven and dishwasher get confused because when the heating element turns on in the dishwasher, it’s the exact same steady 1100w that my toaster oven is. I kept pressing this device is not on, but eventually I realized if they look exactly the same, what is sense to do? I have a HS-115 on my dishwasher and the toaster oven gets a little extra “use”.
This is often the cause of a lot of the duplication or conflation issues. On a bright note, I’m pretty excited to share a few things early next year pertaining to device detection that I think will improve the experience users have with device detection in general.
My two month old Sense detected the coffee maker fairly quickly, but I just used the toaster oven for the first time in months and it called it the coffee maker.
I understand they look nearly identical (as far as the power drawn), but there are different cycle times. The coffee maker runs one cycle for 2 1/2 or 3 minutes, the toaster oven runs 5-7 cycles over a 10 minute period. The oven has some cycles under a half minute. The coffee maker would never do that.
Sense looks at on and off transitions, not so much at cycle times. Sense looks at many parameters of those transitions, well beyond just wattage, but if device on and off signatures are very similar in all those different parameters, Sense may conflate them.
I understand that there’s more than to look at than just the power drawn, but one resistive heating element will look very much like another. They should improve the detection to allow for “changing my mind” when they see similar devices power on and after a bit one cycles where another wouldn’t.
Hi @demiller9 - detecting devices in real-time presents some of the obstacles that @kevin1 mentioned above. Sense doesn’t wait for 3-4 minutes to tell you your device is on, so the run-time/cycle time is irrelevant for detection in this case. It sees a signature very similar to your coffee maker and reports it as on. Over time, this may improve as the device model sees more run cycles. We’re also looking at ways outside of real-time detection to help some of the types of issues in the future. We’ll talk more about this in the coming months.
I hear what you’re saying about real-time detection, but I think that has some conceptual problems. A modified real-time approach might solve this. Imagine saying that you’ll route packages by the width and depth you see as they pass the scanner. Tag a signature with a device name, but if the owner has indicated that device is conflated with others, be able to take a second look.
Heating elements all have similarities; the total power draw, time to reach peak heat or to cool again are some of the details that might tell one from another. The space being heated is also a key that it seems Sense does not look at. The mass being heated will determine the duty cycling parameters. An oven is bigger than the toaster oven, which is bigger than the toaster. A soldering iron, a curling iron, an individual cup heater, a water kettle, a coffee maker. All of these want to heat up quickly, and are limited to the amount of power a socket can provide. Some of them will try to hold a temperature, some just reach a temperature and shut off.
Motors may have chaotic loads (clothes dryer with tumbling clothing), or may have constant loads (air blower). Some may have decreasing load (garage door). You use some of these details now. I think you are wasting another measurement (time and duty cycle) that could be very helpful.
I don’t know where the logic is that tags the power graph and puts entries in the timeline. It may be inside the Sense unit in my breaker panel, or it may be in ‘the cloud’ in Sense’s servers. Wherever it is, it must have a list of devices in my home that have been identified, and the timeline to display when I look at it. If the device list had an attribute that says ‘this device needs two looks to distinguish from another device’, you could queue up the second look to see the duty cycle, or total runtime, single heat, etc. When tagging the signature as an coffee maker, you would see that I’ve indicated it was confused by the toaster oven. (Both use maximum allowable power but one cycles and the other doesn’t). Queue it up for another look after three minutes and you’ll know which was right.
I think Sense does great identifying what it does now, but could be even better.
