Thanks. I did say it’s “ONE of the most expensive”. I didn’t say it was THE most expensive. 
netgear wifi home testing app says I have a 40% signal and 28mbps at the panel.
That’s a bad signal so Jeff was right. Poor wifi connectivity provided a poor experience.
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The good news for me is that I have my router and one access point inside the same garage-side service closet as the electrical panel. The bad news is that the service closet is chock full of WiFi devices, cable amplifiers, switches and the electrical gear, as well as the panel itself. Usually have good signal quality between the access point and Sense (6’ apart - dotted yellow), but the noise level is quite high.
In terms of something LIKE Sense, there’s a couple of options that will plug directly into an ethernet cable which should side step any wifi issues.
EyeDro makes an ethernet version, and it’s cheaper if all you need is whole house energy usage without much else.
TED makes a higher cost unit that can also plug into ethernet, the basic unit with whole house measurement is a bit more than a Sense, and the cost can jump up if you want to monitor lots of individual circuits.
This is for Jeff’s post back on Feb 15 where he should us some graphs of information.
A couple of questions -
- What are you using to monitor and show this? It looks like RRDs / MRTG with SNMP type monitoring.
2 - I would suggest that rather than try and send all the data when you are reconnected that the appliance self limit itself to say 10x of 20x what is normal for it to be sending. That way , it would not ‘cause’ any trouble to the rest of the users on that same network / uplink to the Web.
– Plus - it would be a self limiting process to the SaaS site where all this data is communicating with. ie - what if a neighbor hood is really sold on Sense - has a Internet outage- (Fiber cut for instance) when the connection was restored, the 59-200 homes would all be taking at the same time.
– it is just a suggestion to help the devices play nice in the same sand box.
The graph was grabbed from my Ubiquiti UniFi dashboard. Not sure with the ever increasing broadband connection at most homes that throttling will be that big of a deal for most, but if you do have a low speed upstream connection it could cause congestion and apparent slowness. Possibly just have a setting to select your internet upload or run a speed test from the device itself to dynamically determine the upload capacity and set a limit from that value.
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Jeff, Thanks for the information.
I looked back and looked at the peak usage that you showed.
24 Kbps for your traffic. That sounds really low - but it adds up when you consider different levels of users.
If I use the 24 Kbps for a user - I get these estimates for usage.
1 Mb ~= 41.667 users
10 Mb ~- 416 users
100 Mb ~= 4,166 users
1 Gb ~= 41,666 users
So the question becomes what happens when the device can not upload data. Does it behave OK with Re transmissions?
How do they (sense) handle the systems where this is going to? Is it load balanced in some way? What is their Internet pipe size they are using?
All questions that as a Performance Analyst and Capacity Planner I end up asking when a system is designed or once they begin to see problems. In years past I was working at a company that did the yearly Flex Enrollment processing for different companies of the 500 list. Each year we kept adding more companies and each year there was a challenge in forecasting the next peak load. Luckily we were able to spread the Enrollment calendar so not all the companies did not happen at the same time period.
I’m just bringing up some concerns and wondering if there are any design choices to be made in the upload or communication process so it can scale to many users.
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Looks like 2/3rd of the traffic goes to Amazon hosted systems so I would assume that AWS has them balanced. The other 1/3rd is secure traffic that I don’t have logs of where the traffic is actually going.
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I’m guessing that virtually all of Sense’s customer-facing data collection, updates to probes and data display back to customers is hosted by AWS. And I think AWS offers scalability well beyond smallish installed bases like Sense.
I use a TRENDnet Powerline 500 AV Mini Network Starter Kit, Includes 2 x TPL-406E Adapters, TPL-406E2K https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008F537KC/
and use it to put an access point in the room inside the house from the outside panel where the Sense is installed with the antenna coming through a knockout in the side of the metal box.
That seems to work.