I’m curious as to why my “Always On” value fluctuates so much? One day (yesterday) it’s 185W, the next day (like now) it’s 155W. Obviously the 30W difference is something that’s not “Always On” so why is it counted as such?
I have a goal notification set if it gets over a certain amount (165W, I figured 10W over my “normal” baseline of 155W for the past month or so would be good) and it keeps getting triggered regularly.
Anyone? @RyanAtSense?
Even at “rest” my house doesn’t go all the way to 185W either which makes it even more “strange”
Hmmm. Your Always On is calculated over a 24 hour period, so it’s not unheard of for it to change day by day. Do you have something running every other day or so?
Ah ok. I didn’t realize it was calculated over just the last 24 hour period. It would make sense then if these fluctuate. I think the other day I left my laserprinter on in “standby” mode, instead of switching it off so that’s probably why it was high that day or something.
Yup, it’s explained a bit more here: What is "Always On" Power? - Sense Blog
That should explain what’s happening, but let me know if things get…weirder.
Mine fluctuates anywhere between 609 (which it currently is, and which is low for us) and 1200. Can’t figure out what in the world could be the difference. We unplugged the subwoofer and a cable box to see what difference that would make, and it dropped it by about 50W. The next day (or rather, the day after the next day because it did take 24 hours to drop those off), it was back up again and we had not plugged them back in. I swear I think there must be a power cable running into my neighbor’s house or something.
Yeah that seems like a huge difference. Even 609W as the low seems very high.
Tell me about it… that is the main reason I got the Sense, because my power bills are outrageous. And the helpful Sense monthly report tells me I’m higher than 90% in Always On for other Sense owners in my state. The good news is that most of the high draw things have been detected, so “Other” is usually pretty low. But I just can’t narrow down what the always on could be, unless it is just the sum of the ton of crap that is plugged in all the time (stereos, speakers, DVR’s, etc). Don’t get me wrong I do love the Sense, because at least I can control what I know, like when my pantry light was detected and I could tell someone left it on all day, using 112W. We replaced it with a motion detecting LED fixture. So every little bit counts. I guess it’s every little bit adding up to a ton of always on. I’ll never be the “King” 
That’s what power sensing Smartplugs like the TP-Link HS110 or Wemo Insight are for - monitoring clusters of devices that likely won’t be identified by Sense, because they are truly Always On, or are likely to have erratic on, steady state, and off signatures (i.e. plasma TVs, stereo amplifiers).
@kevin1 which smart plug do you recommend? I have none…my Always on is down to 53W. I know where 20W of that comes from but not the remainder. It’s tough to determine the Modem/Router/WiFi device usage because Sense needs it to work.
You can setup a hotspot on your phone of your 4G Data with the same SSID and password as your Wi-Fi and your Sense will connect to it so you can turn your Wi-Fi router off to see what it uses.
Nice. Very creative. Thank you for that. I’ll give it a try.
I used to use Eve Energy’s for two reasons:
They also had a couple of challenges
Have since transitioned to TP-Link HS-110s for a few reasons:
I have the TP-LINK HS-110 and the Belkin Wemo Insight.
I think the HS-110 is the better choice as the Wemo defaults to off after a power outage.
There are 3 versions of the HS-110, V1, V2, & V3. V3 is set up Europe. The V1 and V2 are for the US. The V2 is more current than the V1, but seems hard to get. My V2 arrives next week. I had to go through support to get it. Amazon only has the V1.
The V2 has a limit of 3.68kW. I notice our clothes dryer consumes 5.75kW… The V1 can go to 1.8kW at 120V.
The V1 suggests you upgrade the firmware when you install it. That is very important as you get bogus numbers out of the box.
The numbers vary a bit between the HS-110, Wemo, and Sense, but they are close.
You can get real time data from all three but it takes some programming. HS-110 and Wemo granularity is 1s. Sense is .5s. The Sense real time data does not seem to be as reliable as the downloadable hourly data. Their patent says they do more extensive processing on the hourly data.
Is the most recent version of firmware you have seen, v1.2.5 ?
Yes. The V1 came with 1.1.1 and the upgrade went to 1.2.5.
Thank you for sharing this information.
This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.