Sense has been making the TV news over the last couple of weeks. It’s great to see our utility partners showcasing Sense-enabled meters. National Grid has already deployed new smart meters across 10% of its 1.7 million residential customers in upstate New York.
As the rollout of even more meters continues, consumers will soon have access to tools like the Sense app, providing them with deeper insights into their energy use.
The part that most interested me was, “The online and smartphone apps are expected to be in full service within the next year.” Based on this, even customers who already have the smart meter hardware installed do not yet have access to the Sense app for viewing their data. It may be a year before any users with Sense built into their smart meters show up here on the forum.
Yup - There’s a smattering of Sense with National Grid help collateral and guidance up on the Sense site. It looks like they are doing a slowly phased set of deployments and app / account activations.
Kevin, thank you for sharing another interesting link. From this one I liked, “At this time, Sense-enabled electric meters are incompatible with homes that have solar panels installed. We hope to add that support in the future.” I assume that also means no DCM for smart meter customers. Such limits are not unexpected because with the Sense hardware sealed inside the electric meter, there can be nowhere to attach leads from extra sensors.
@jefflayman, yes, the Q&A is enlightening. I’m glad that the suggested workaround / fix is to buy the orange box ! That speaks to the long-term future for the orange box, though I would like to see a future monitor with an added set of battery and DCM sensors.
Since you shared your hope for future hardware, I will share mine. I envision an add-on unit that I call “Sense-prime.” This would be a dumbed-down version of the orange box we know. It would have a bunch of terminals for connecting DCM/solar/battery clamps and little else. It would be slaved to the primary Sense via WiFi (so that it could work with smart meters) but would not need the complicated circuitry to parse the signal 1 million times per second since its data would just be merged at 0.5 second intervals. That is, all the device disaggregation would be left to the main Sense unit, and data from the Sense-prime would be integrated by the app in the same fashion as data from energy-monitoring smart plugs produced by Kasa. Sense-prime would thus be backwards compatible and not require replacement of legacy hardware.
