Has Sense died?

There have been numerous feature/fix requests over the last few years, but it doesn’t seem that any steps have been taken to address any of them. There have been small app updates, but not much of substance. No movement at all on any of the bigger ticket items. And interaction between users and the Sense team here in the community has dropped precipitously.

I think it’s come to the point that it’s reasonable to ask: Is Sense being carried forward? Or has it died so slowly that we really didn’t notice?

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@dennypage, my belief, and it’s kind of backed up by changes in the web site, the app, and the news, that they mostly investing in the meter part of the business today, where they work with the meter makers and sell through utilities.

That’s probably a path to long-term growth and success, not death, but it certainly means a slow roll for new features exclusive to the standalone monitor. My optimistic hope is that that means we will see continued improvement on the common features like data science / detection. I have seen an interesting new button pop up on my iOS Sense app at the bottom of the Device list, but it doesn’t do anything yet.

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FWIW, I believe that is a link to the old “list all the major devices in your home” settings option. That’s what pops up, and quickly disappears, on my phone when I hit that button.

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Thanks for pointing out the potential new feature, Kevin. I tried the button and agree that what pops up quickly disappears. I snapped a screen shot in that half-second so I could see more clearly what it was. It seems to be a list similar to the one for choosing an icon to be associated with a smart plug.

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@dennypage , @jefflayman ,

@JamesDrewAtSense confirmed to me that the feature is not working yet, and has reported internally. It did the exact same thing for me - popped up and popped back down.

I’m pretty sure that the new setup inventory stuff when configuring a new Sense and this button represent a different way of supplementing device detection vs. the original Home inventory that once existed under Settings. But I don’t think the associated detection backend is in place yet.

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Hi all,

I just wanted to confirm several things here.

  1. The issue with the “Add Device” feature is a bug that occurs only on iOS and seems to affect only users who have integrations with Smart Plugs or Hue Lights. We are working on it, and it’s a priority.
  2. I can’t get into too many details, but if you add a device here that is not already detected, it can help contribute insights and data for that device before it is fully detected. This will not happen in real-time but may show up as historical data—weekly, monthly, etc. Some of these devices are trickier to detect in a more “real-time” way at this moment, so we are working to improve things overall. Note, however, that this does not guarantee that data will be recorded retroactively if these devices are added—only that they possibly may be.

@dennypage I’m quite sure I’m aware of the bigger-ticket items you are speaking of, but as you may guess, things change around here, and we are actually quite busy. So if you wish, either send me a private message or mention some of the items/concerns here, and I can look into them.

Please be aware, though, that I can’t guarantee anything. But being part of customer support, if it gives customers a headache, it probably does the same for me.

Finally, in terms of interaction, in my opinion, the community is here for Sense users to interact with each other. I wouldn’t assume Sense employees aren’t welcome, but neither do I want to take too heavy a hand in the conversation most times unless I think I can really help. But tag me or PM me—I’ll read it, and I like to think I’m responsive.

Thanks again.

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Hi James, thank you for asking.

The bit ticket items for my personal needs are:

  • Ability to delete smart plugs. Discussed here and probably a dozen other places in the community forums. We already have the ability to delete/forget devices, we just need to be able to do that for devices that originally came from smart integrations. Deleting the entire integration and starting over is not viable for most of us.
  • Local broadcast/multicast of CT readings. Discussed here. Many of us use Sense in home automation systems such as Home Assistant, and constant polling of Sense’s internet servers is an issue for both users and Sense itself. Polling the servers isn’t the most reliable, introduces significant delay, and presents unnecessary load to the Sense backend system. NB: this is not a request for a local rest api (which would be a lot of work), but for a single outbound multicast packet only. No form of request/reply.

One more, which doesn’t directly affect me, but I know has affected a lot of people:

  • Ability to have multiple Sense units on one account.

Thanks again.

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Thank you

These are issues that have been on my radar and have been discussed previously.

I will bring these up again.

I’ll let you know if I receive a statement on any of these I can share.

Thanks again!

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James, I appreciate your willingness to receive input and occasionally post to the forum. Yes, I imagine that the Sense team is busy, because life has a way of doing that. At the same time, I empathize with @dennypage because there is little progress visible to us, the forum and product users. Here I collect several explanations for the disconnect between a busy Sense team and a bored Sense audience.

  1. Low hanging fruit has already been picked. During product development, it is easy to see changes at the beginning but harder at the end. The developers obviously focus on the most impactful work first, which leaves the less impactful stuff towards the end. Also, the relative impact of a given change is less when the total is big than when the total is small.

  2. We had become spoiled. It was really nice having access to the creators of a product, but that is not how it usually works. I expressed this thought here on the forum 3 years ago:

  1. Sense focus has changed. Kevin alluded to this above when he wrote:

I share Kevin’s hope that the work done by the Sense team will show up eventually. We the users appreciate Sense’s work, even though we can’t always see it.

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“Add Device” appears on the mobile app 2025.3 build 6611 as an active feature.

Essentially, this feature is an expansion of the ‘new user experience’, where upon setup new users are asked a series of questions about devices in their home. Sense then automatically creates non-realtime, estimated devices based on the users input. These estimated devices turn into ‘real’ devices if all natively discovered.
‘Estimates’ and ‘estimates stats’ are based on ‘general averages’ although this part is not currently working. I imagine it’s a related ‘bug’ as part of this seemingly new feature ‘leak’. ‘new user experience’ devices only have white icon’, ‘add device’ devices are yellow. As you can see below ‘oven’ is a ‘new user experience’ device, ‘window ac’ is a ‘add device’ device (I since deleted).

Appears “Add Device” expands on this as a means for users to manually add devices. My assumption is that this feature is being implemented in relation to smart meters in conjunction with utility providers as they are quickly finding out that relying on ‘Device Detection’ alone is a disappointment, and does not provide end user utility consumers with the level of information they had expected and were promised. A sort of quick half ass fix (for lack of better wording) allowing utilities to provide some sort of slightly more accurate ‘energy insight’ to their customers, compared to any other non Sense capable smart meter.
My guess is that Sense needs to start showing some sort of benefit to the end user and ‘device detection’ just isn’t living up to anyone’s expectations. Similar as to how many orange & (formally) green box user have been let down.





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@obscuredtrip , appreciate your analysis of the mechanics of the new way to specify home devices. But I think you are a bit harsh in your rationale for why a second kind of detection is underway. My take is that Sense is hitting the natural limits for real-time detection, and is now taking the path of more sophisticated post-real-time analysis.

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I wouldn’t call it any type of ‘detection’. Unless Sense is working on a way to “train Sense”, “tell Sense what to look for”, which I highly doubt as we are still waiting on progressive device detection. There has not been any major improvements to device detection this decade. I have near zero confidence there will be.

Utilities have been asking what type of equipment is in your house along with basic surveys for the past 20+ years to estimate what is using the most electricity and make energy improvement recommendations based on averages.
This appears to be nothing more than a colorful way of displaying that. These are not real time devices. They are not post processed devices. They are nothing more than ‘estimates’ based on generic non user specific data of what a given type of device generally consumes. Hence why they have no on/off status, retroactive timeline etc… but could show ‘stats’ based on the ‘averages’ of all users of the device type.
The ‘average consumer’ wants to see something, this is a way of providing that. It’s probably safe to say 98%+ of customers on the utility side will never become ‘invested’ in Sense or even care how Sense works. They care much less about looking at ‘real time’ bubbles all day, all they want is to know why their bills are so damn high. Maybe in a decade or two when utilities start implementing real time ‘demand pricing’ at the device level and ‘demand response’ programs at the device level (in addition to HVAC), but certainly not now. I do believe this is a huge reason why utilities are becoming invested now, as existing smart meters already provide them with customer level grid monitoring, outages, spikes, etc… And a major reason why Schneider and others have taken a different path investing so heavily in smart breaker technology.

Users like us have provided Sense with enough data to make better estimates and when you combine that with native detected data it’s a lot easier sell.

I had really hoped more would come of the ‘home assessment’ report" Sense partnered up with NYS to provide Sense users who opted in a couple years ago. But from what I’ve been told by NYS, Sense has prohibited NYS from doing much with it including providing utilities more accurate estimates.

Now Sense isn’t directly selling users data, but they sure are using it and the ability to collect it as a marketing tool for their partnerships. We all know how Sense over hypes is marketing with some even questioning if it could be consider fraudulent. They is no reason to believe the same thing has not occurred with utilities, investors or anytime else.

I have absolutely no reason to believe Sense is doing anything but the absolute bare minimum to improve it’s product to it’s existing customers. While trying to sell to new utility customers, especially outside the US in order to show a ROI to their financial investors.

IMO Sense needs to really focus on improving real time native device detection, it’s the only real ‘unique’ advantage it has. Unless Sense will be incorporating this as a way to ‘train Sense’ or ‘tell Sense what to look for’, I don’t see them seceding long term as anyone can create generic estimates. I’ve seen no indication that Sense is successfully making any major improvements to native device detection, all signs indicate otherwise.
I hate to say it but pushing utility sales (which they have been extremely successful at) while seemingly investing the minimum to improve the core product is more indicative of a future cash-out.

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Thank you, @obscuredtrip , for explaining the logic behind your predictions. Time will tell if you are correct. For now, I am interested in the fact that you seem to have been able to try out the Add Device feature. This means that for you, it did not quickly disappear. That means that the bug James refers to is the quick disappearance, rather than the feature itself.

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Hi, thanks all for posting. I will work on replying more in-depth, but I just wanted to clarify this one point now.

Yes, you should be able to “Add Devices”—that is not the issue. This feature has been released and has been usable for users for a while now. The issue is that it closes instantly upon opening. I apologize for the confusion.

More specifically, if you have an Android device, or if you have an iOS device with no smart plugs or Hue lights, you should also be able to use this feature. Something about the integrations causes it to close instantly.

There could be other factors too, but I was able to confirm that users with no integrations enabled on iOS were able to “add” devices.

Hope this helps! Sorry if I was confusing previously.

@obscuredtrip, @jefflayman, @JamesDrewAtSense,

The button is back working for me - doesn’t just flash. Let’s me enter stuff.

@jefflayman , I understand where you are coming from. But as a data science guy, I can see a number of valid reasons that Sense would take a second non-real-time approach to detection:

  • The real-time requirement imposes some really stringent constraints on what Sense can and can’t “see” when making a classification based on a 1-second window.
  • Many devices require longer context windows just to see the entire on-transition ramp, and off-transition ramp. This is the EV problem. Sense has built a few special real-time detectors for a few EVs, but Sense really needs to move to a longer context window, and away from a real-time system to generalize.
  • And many other big power users, from large-screen TVs, to PCs to washing machines, to dishwashers, to heat pumps, generate a broad array of waveform transitions that have to be analyzed over a broad range of time to “detect”. The have no single on-transition or off-transition.

One of Sense’s big challenges, outside of getting a second post-waveforms approach to detection to work, is the display the results in a way that is intuitive and additive to the real-time approach. We’ll see, but I’m betting on useful results from a second post-waveforms approach to detection.

Yes, the Add Device button is now working for me, too. The screen that pops up after pressing that button no longer quickly disappears. Sense must have fixed the bug that was affecting IOS users with integrations.

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