Extracting detail from the power meter

Technical Questions
5

Unfortunately the direct data at 1/2 second resolution is not available unless you know a fair bit about scraping data from the web. But there are things you can do to get more detail.

  1. Zoom in, Zoom out - plus use the measuring bar as you are already doing. Sense has done some good work in the UI to make sure your don’t lose peaks (maxes) and valleys (mins) when you Zoom out - in other words, a smart Zoom, so you don’t miss important details.
  2. Use the Phone/Tablet app - The Phone/Tablet app gives on additional clue / detail when the Power Meter is “running”. The Power Meter highlights “transitions of interest” that Sense typically uses to do native detection, via waveform tags that show the power change at that transition. If the transitions you are trying to understand are tagged, there’s a chance that Sense will eventually pair up matching ons and offs and identify that pair as a new device. Here’s an example of the tags from within the iPhone App.
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  3. Wait for Sense to detect - If the transitions that you are interested in are tagged, then waiting might help. Sense looks for a substantial number of repetitions before “deciding” to do a native detection. It has to determine that the transitions are unique, and that there are matching unique ons and offs. Not always possible.
  4. Use a “roaming” smart plug like a KP115, as @jefflayman suggests. Plug your fridge into the KP115, and you will see exactly what it is using over time. Don’t spot waveform of interest - try the “roaming” smart plug on another appliance, etc.
  5. Use Home Assistant - Home Assistant is a “free” open source home automation platform that runs on lots of different platforms. I use a small, old headless (no monitor) PC NUC. There’s a prebuilt Integration that connects to Sense and captures both realtime and trend data from the Sense monitor via the Sense mothership (cloud). I’m not going not going to go into depth about all the things you can do, but suffice it to say if you want sub-hourly data, and are willing to do some simple coding, this is a great way to go.
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