I decided to take a look at bunch of my 240V devices that have been natively detected by Sense to see what the Power Meter makes of each on/off. Does it see it as a transition or not per the tags ? From the looks of it, there were changes made in the Sense firmware in Oct. that show up in the Power Meter tagging (more on that in a bit).
First off, Sense did tag a bunch of my 240V device going on and off. The first four significant bumps on the left are me turning on each floor heating loop. The next two bigger bumps are charring ramps for my Model S, then the one for my Model 3.
Looking a little closer at the heating loops, one thing jumps out at me. I know the biggest heating loops are around 5.6kW so the transition tags (on and off of 2.9kW) are too small by 2x, so the tag really seems to represent the 120V transition power. The good news is that it does show up as 5.6kW for the actual detection !
The EV charging tags are even more interesting. It used to be that Sense might pick up one very wrong part of the charging transition or nothing at all. Now Sense seems to capture longer (more than a second or two) stretches of the ramp, plus captures multiple steps in the ramp. Just looking at the the numbers again, it looks like Sense is using the 120V transition value for the tag, though again, it is getting power number for the device detection correct.
So the new behaviors I’m seeing from the tags:
- The Sense monitor is inserting tags for events it didn’t used to flag as consistently (EV charging ramps)
- The Sense monitor / mothership no longer seem to be substituting device names into the tags when it detects a known device, but if that’s a side-effect of better, more consistent native detection, I’m all for that.
- The tags are also more persistent in the Power Meter. It used to be that if you move to any other view, previously inserted tags would disappear, and you would only see newly created tags as they were generated once you jumped back to the power meter. From what I can see now, the new tags start to be written once you enter the Power Meter, an remain in the Power Meter view for all on as you have the app running (there might also we a number of tags limit or time limit).
If this new behavior is long-lived and consistent, it should help people better know whether Sense is picking up some interpretation of the on and off transitions from their harder to detect devices.