Also, if the air handlers are identical, then it’s not surprising that Sense can’t distinguish them.
If the air handlers are 120v powered (not 240), then moving one to a different leg of service will help Sense distinguish them. Changing to a slightly different fan speed tap on one of the units might also do the trick.
I’d say not well at this point. My Rheem EcoNet app shows 8 times the usage that Sense reports. One if my Mitsubishi mini splits was detected early on but showed a steady 95 watts consumption or 0. After a few weeks it showed varied consumption up to approximately 900 watts but how will I know when/if it ever detects all of it?
Does the water heater have an app that you can compare the tracking accuracy with?
What wattage does sense report back when your Rheem HPWH is detected? I see anywhere from 170 - 200 watts on mine.
Usually 258 watts.
I don’t expect Sense to tell the two fans apart. They are both 240, and on the same side of the panel. The heat pump, however…
It’s closed-loop, the pipe goes down the well and back up. I attach 3 screen shots. The first is the power meter strip with solar on it, the up and down has to be heat pump and fan(s) as we weren’t home. The second and third are the power meters for the fan (lots of little spikes) and pump (all the same spikes.). Looks fairly smooth to me. A fan may run without the GSHP, but the pump doesn’t run without a fan. I guess a small circulating pump also runs for the radiant heat, but I’m not sure what its signature is. Part of the challenge is, I can’t manually turn off or on any of the sub-parts of the system, or change fan speed–all I can do is change thermostats.
Ruth
The house I bought 3 years ago came with an older boiler and 3 ASHPs none of which the Sense reliably detected. The boiler it did detect after about a year. We just turned on our new geothermal system GSHP, also a Hydron Module (HYT048), but water-to-air with a closed loop well. It just dumps it into “other”. This is frustrating, and I’m looking for other options to monitor the energy used by the heat pump, if anyone has any ideas I’m all ears. Thank you.
I’m going to try adding an “AC display meter” to the circuit for the GSHP. I wish it was WIFI and a richer tracking suite, but honestly there are very few possible options for monitoring a single device.
It’s on amazon. Search: AC Display Meter, DROK 80-300V 100A Voltage Current Power Factor Frequency Electric Energy Monitor Ammeter Voltmeter Multimeter Tester 110V 220V Digital Color LCD Volt Amp Watt Detector Reader Panel
I’ll update as to how it works tracking kWh…
Most reliable long term option is getting a second Sense or using spare Sense Solar CTs IMHO. Eventually Sense may integrate multiple Senses into one account but it doesn’t matter in the meantime because you can readily assess how much energy your main energy-sucker is using at a ground-truth level (no detection guesswork).
Things to check with that DROK:
UL/NEC approved?
Split-ring/clamp CTs? (otherwise you need to pull out wires)
Just one CT? Confused about how that would work with dual-phase supply.
I have a geosource whole house heat pump that I installed about 5 months ago. It has a fan, a compressor, various other accessory motors, and so on. Sense has no idea whatsoever what it is seeing so far. It misidentifies much of what the heat pump is doing as other things it has previously identified in the house. So, it tells me that LED lights are on, when they are not, but some aspect of the heat pump is operating. It also misidentifies some cycles of the heat pump as my heated bathroom floor. Some of the cycles, of course, are idenfied as “other”.
I’d recommend adding a meter like the DROK to track kWh usage, as I describe doing above. It only goes up to 3 digits so I plan to log and then reset it every first of the month. Works great so far.
Hi IXU,
I thought about that (using a second sense) because I’m already using my solar CTs for monitoring my solar production. Putting another $250 into a product I’m not too confident in or pleased with didn’t seem like a good decision.
So far it seems to be working well and voltage seems accurate within 1% compared to my Fluke.
My heat pump has a web interface that tracks kWh usage, so that the Sense can’t do it is not really very important to me directly except insofar as Sense should ideally track everything. I have never found that Sense can track more than 50% of my usage, although recently it has been able to see my electric car. Even that is flawed as it misses some of the car’s usage.
True. And probably the phases are being used “evenly” so you’ll get an accurate account by doubling the single current reading on one phase. The wired-in DROK is both powering the DROK itself and giving it voltage readings on each phase (like Sense does). The gotcha is if there’s a component in the GSHP system that’s running single-phase (120V) and so pulling more current on that phase (voltage unaffected). That’s probably not the case but it’s something to be aware of. Auxiliary heaters, fans and controllers could potentially be using a single phase.
That brings me to a thought:
What manufacture do you have?
My Heat Pump is a GeoStar Symphony 3 Ton whole house unit providing heating in the winter and cooling in the summer using a 12 speed compressor and 12 speed fan.
Sounds like a great unit.
Its not a bad idea to use a dedicated sense on a particular appliance. My heat pump has both 240 volt and 120 supplies, so it will take a bit of thought to figure out how to use it as a dedicated device. I will put on my thinking cap… I wonder what the Sense people think of the idea?
The supplies are on separate 120 & 240 circuits?
In that case it may be a straightforward matter of routing the matched 120V leg (phase) through the same 240V phase. Could be tricky if the breakers/wires are not sympathetic. You’ll need some wiggle room in the wires. It’s something you can do one wire at a time so when you add the 120V wire, for example, you can see the added wattage on that leg in the Settings>Signals, as opposed to it being the wrong way around and subtracting wattage.
If nothing else you get to play with Sense and use it as a cool meter that’s a lot cheaper than a Fluke!
For my geothermal heat pump its hardly worth the trouble and expense to buy another sense and use it as a dedicated monitor. Maybe “Sense” can come up with a “junior” model that can do this, and interface with the main unit. I already know every detail of the energy usage of my geopump because the unit reports it all. So, for example for October to early March I know it used a total of 2MWh to heat the house. I also know how that breaks down into the individual usage of the compressor, whole house fan, and geoloop pump. This type of fine grained detail is done very badly by Sense.
