Freezer Inside Light came on while door was closed!
Sense detected, of course I would never see it! Utility light inside freezer is an older type that is about 40 watts. It was tracked by Sense. I was surprised to see the failure captured by Sense. I noticed it was showing in Sense as ON with door closed. Turned on the notifications to capture problem, (intermittent). Anyway, the switch was bouncing but mostly on with door closed, I captured the Sense waveform. Notice, the first spike around 12PM is a normal door open/close. The ratty looking bouncing data that follows is the SWITCH failing. Replaced the switch and fixed the problem.
Ha! Yes, very good on the “cooler catches” - Punny! I like it.
Yes, so depending on the intermittency of the switch, with the light (heater) on, this certainly would impact the power consumption. When I looked back in logs, the problem wasn’t evident for a long period of time so I didn’t pursue the associated cost.
The neat thing is… Who would know that the light was on in the freezer or fridge? Sense did! There are probably a lot more devices that could develop similar issues!
@JustinAtSense and the Sense crew could likely use this one as a model for an automatic alert, no observations required.
For a modern fridge/freezer though without dedicated monitoring on a smart plug the LED bulbs now used are much lower power so harder to detect as increased usage. Also, I don’t know what the door sensors are these days but I’m assuming the switching is more reliable.
In a deeper analysis it may argue for a tweaked dedicated model vs a guessed one.
i.e. A modern fridge/freezer with a low wattage LED should still show the anomaly if the entire device is captured with ground truth data but only, perhaps, if the monitor’s model (vs the Mothership data) is adjusted to be looking at sufficient resolution and time span.
So it may be a low priority auto-notification model/build in the scheme of things but nevertheless it’s an interesting case. It’s the invisible stuff for which Sense is ultimately necessary. For the lazy people like me who don’t want to stare at waveforms.
Hmmmm… Interesting… Sense alerts me to my freezer light being on with the door closed, and I always assumed that Sense was getting confused with something else happening in my household…
I’ll have to check to see if this is actually a malfunctioning light switch… Very interesting…
Users can also select a device such as their fridge light, goto manage. Then + custom notification. If “fridge light” is on for 6 mins. Which at my house means someone didn’t close the door all the way but I think that sense would have caught a bad switch as well.
So, are there actual auto-notifications built into sense now?
I wasn’t aware of any NOTIFY based on a particular previous base line failure, or failure signature.
Like, is there a list of auto-notifications I can review for the devices in my house?
These “built-in notifications” would be great to be able to portray as “cost savings”, etc.
Yes! Good point.
I have used this feature - “on for period” to gage something that may overstep it’s bounds, (On-Time period).
For example, How long should your oil burner be on for given it’s your hot water boiler furnace? - Safety issue here and Sense can help assist!
AFAIK such failure analysis as would be required for auto-notifications (Emergency Alerts even) is “in the works” for some/many devices and situations but the implementation is likely non-trivial. Perhaps @JustinAtSense can update us? Is there a list? I’ve lost track.
There are many Community references to fridge/freezer notifications (I made a few) and indications that Team Sense is looking into other alertable situation. An example:
