We hope all of you and your loved ones are safe and healthy at home.
We’ve shifted into our snow day protocol, working remotely, so our Support team is still available if you have any issues with your Sense monitor.
With a lot of us planning on spending more time at home over the next couple of weeks, it might be nice to share some ways that folks are spending that extra time. I have been playing a lot more morning jazz in my living room. My roommate, a chef, was laid off for 30 days and came home with several trays of ingredients and food. Now that my fridge has never been so full of high-end ingredients, I’ve learned how to make a proper Niçoise Salad and a great brisket dry rub.
Have a great recipe you’ve been trying out? Share it below.
Find a great board game? Perfect, I’m starting to get really sick of Catan.
Chime in, we’d love to hear from you.
On Monday, I was sent home from work and told to take my computer (+3 monitors) home to work. I’ve set up my workstation but only have room for 2 monitors lol. I’ve turned up my thermostat, as the wife and I both work so no reason to keep the house heated all day, until now.
Will be interesting to see how much more electricity I’m going to use now that I’m home all day. Luckily, I’m also on an equal payment plan with Duke Progress, so I won’t see the damage ($) until next year…
Weekly trending power consumption from the past few weeks is something we’re curious about as well. I’d imagine we’d see the biggest impact for our solar users.
I work from home normally, so not much changed now that everyone at my company has to work from home. My wife now has to work from home about 50% of the time (she’s a veterinarian, so she has to go to the hospital about 50% of her days to see patients), and she doesn’t like the daytime thermostat setting (64 degrees is normally just fine for me!), so she’s running a space heater in her new office. That’s increasing our electricity consumption a few kWh per day so far.
I suspect (overall) energy consumption changes to be about like this (for the 50% of days when my wife is working from home):
Space heater (+1500W) for a few hours a day
Microwave (+1600W) for a few minutes a day to heat wife’s lunch
Wife’s laptop and phone (+40W or so) for ~8 hours per day
Lights in wife’s office (+16W) for ~8 hours per day
Gasoline (-0.2gal per day): (5 mile commute each way in a Prius C)
Hot water (it’s a gas heater) increase (not easily quantified)
Overall water usage increase (not easily quantified)
There are some negligible differences as well: increase in electricity consumption by networking equipment, decrease in (gas-powered) furnace due to space heater use and extra body heat.
Moved to a “WFH” posture, like most of the other fortunate professionals… I’m joining my retired stay-at-home spouse - saving the hour commute (each way)! I’ll seek to work this way, until my final retirement.
There shouldn’t be any impact our home’s current energy consumption, whatsoever. I pray that each of you continues to be healthy and safe, throughout this period of uncertainty!
I’ve seen definite increases in my water heater, HVAC, and kitchen loads. I’ll definitely be interested to see the numbers after this all subsides.
I’m doing my best to take this extra home time to hang more with the wife and cat, watch movies, play some new video games (finally digging into the Assassin’s Creed series), make music, read, and just generally tinker about with things that need/want tinkering. I’m starting to learn Lua, as it seems to be a common language used in programmable audio devices.
The Sense brain I suspect is doing quite well under these circumstances. Perhaps there will be a surge in fridge light detections.
Definitely more kettle and toaster use than usual. I’ve been wondering about the power stations … consumption must have gone down significantly throughout the city with restaurant closures and so on.
We’re surrounded by restaurants, now closed, so there has been a dramatic silencing.
Reading is much easier.
Noise cancelling headphones suddenly seem anachronistic.
There is a distinct lack of fire engine (FDNY) sirens, something that in normal times I hear several (many) times a day. In the past I have monitored the FDNY broadcasts: “Odor of gas” is probably the most common call that results in a truck being sent. Reduced construction activity may be some of the cause but also having people at home you would think probably reduces the incidence of central fire alarms.
So I ponder how Sense fits in here. The patterns have changed. The alerts are different. A full freezer that loses power is a more urgent issue. Indications of a brownout need action. The load-shifting equations, especially with solar and EVs, become more crucial.
As a shout-out to Sense: I’m reassured by having an easily accessible and detailed window into my electrical usage and supply. I know there are development priorities and that disaggregation is at the top of the list – without moving that forward, Sense’s future is limited. This is perhaps not a time to be modifying anything, “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it”, but is there an alert that makes sense at a time like this?
In the grim days ahead I expect the sirens of ambulances will fill the void.
The sun came out today, showing its full glory! All homeowners on the cul-de-sac agreed to come out and onto their front porches at noon, waving, smiling,
extending well-wishes - acknowledging the beautiful sight and each other…
The sun came out, indicating a promise of other brighter-days ahead! During times of uncertainty, patience and perseverance are needed. I’m looking forward to promises-kept…
Well-wishes sent across the nation to each of you. I hope that you can see the sun!
Beautiful day here on the Santa Clara / San Mateo county border in Silicon Valley. Shelter-in-place convinced me to trim our backyard and I’ve been rewarded after a few days of rain by a breath-taking (in a good way) morning, over some better-manicured plants. Yes, @invoice, we have sunshine, and brighter days are coming.
A lot feels normal, a lot does not. Kids are home from college, and surprisingly have been on a rigorous unbroken lecture and homework/project schedule. Berkeley engineering seems to have been very ready for this. Even though it’s ostensibly Spring Break this week, the kids continue to work on their CS projects and socialize via online gaming. They are the natural denizens of this newly enforced, low-live-contact world. Meanwhile the local numbers arc upward, though the growth rate seems to be tapering a little.
On the energy front, the kids’ gaming computers footprint has made itself known in the Playroom Cluster HS110
Well, @kevin1 wins the coveted “prettiest backyard” Sense community award. Glad to see there’s some sunshine over by you. It’s terribly dreary over here in Massachusetts today.
Two games that I’m most familiar with… League of Legends (LoL) - my daughter is a diamond level player on a college team, son more of a casual player. And Dominion, which is also a card game.
I can tell when both are playing LoL - energy use spikes. Tournament this past Sunday.
shop, you think I would know the answer.
