I’ve been using Sense for about a week. It discovered a few things that were spot on, like our dryer.
Then it came up with two mystery devices. It labeled one as “keurig” and it was drawing around 400W. It labeled the other as “fridge 2” and it was drawing 100W (which seemed very low for a fridge).
After hunting around unplugging and replugging various things - and, eliminating the actual Keurig we have, I finally figure out what it was.
We have a countertop composter called a Lomi. It has a heating element and a macerator driven by an electric motor. I run it once or twice a week and it runs for about 24 hours.
It became clear that these two devices were actually the same device - just different parts of it.
I renamed both devices (Lomi - heating and Lomi - motor) and then I used the “merge device” option in the settings of the “Lomi - heating” device to merge it with “Lomi - motor”. Pretty cool!
Welcome, @micah. Thank you for sharing your experience with identifying your electric compost device. The manufacturer of that product claims it uses 0.7kWh of energy per cycle. How does that compare with what Sense measures at your house?
ooo - I’d love to figure that out. This is the first cycle that I’m running it with this merged info in Sense. I did merge the two devices in the middle of the cycle, so I am not sure if that will impact the overall results. It runs for about 24 hours to complete the cycle, so I can gather the data when it’s done.
I am thinking I would add up all the usage recorded from Sense over the course of it’s cycle and then divide by the number of hours the cycle took to get the kWh number. Is that right?
Merges are retroactive, so you should be able to look for combined results right away. Getting the energy use for a cycle is easier than you thought. The device tab reports the information with no addition required. See the red circle in the sample screen below. This view is for one day. If your 24-hour cycle spans two days, then you may have to add the values from successive days.
The unit for energy, kilowatt-hour, is the area under the curve of energy usage over time. For that reason there is no need to divide by the cycle time. If you wanted to know the average wattage, then you would indeed divide by the cycle time.
I looked in the Product Specifications section of the Lomi manual and found a slightly more nuanced version of the manufacturer claims on energy usage. The cycle you mention that takes 24 hours to complete is called Grow mode, so hopefully Sense reports something in the neighborhood of 1.0kWh for a full cycle. It may be less since the fan component of your Lomi is not detected by Sense.
The values reported on the Usage tab are rounded to one decimal. Greater precision of 3 decimal places is available by using the Data Export feature. Data Export is available only on the web version of the Sense app.
