I'm embarrased to admit this but

[rhiner402]

My mysterious “Light 1” is my refrigerator light. It has come on 243 times in the last 3 days.

[samwooly1]

Yeah, that was the detection the wife and kids did not like.
They didn’t like hearing me complain about how many times the door was opened.
I’m still trying to figure out why each of them opens the door at least five times for a glass of milk or juice.
For me, it’s twice.

[len.turnbow]

I replaced my fridge lights with 14 W worth of LEDs. “Door light power” is under the detection threshold now, so it’s not a bother. Plus, the fridge does not have to cool down 80 W worth of incandescents every time the door closes. I replaced the 40 W bulb in the freezer compartment with an LED, too.

[samwooly1]

That is the reason I have not replaced the 200 watts worth of bulbs in mine. I want the extra detection.
If I’m not home and I get an alert, I know someone is home and can tell by the activity and how many times it’s opened just who it is.

It doesn’t stay open long enough to add up and I can set it so if the door was open for more than a minute that I get an alert.

[len.turnbow]

“Refrigerator Morse”? Clever.
–Len

[ixu]

The problem is, @samwooly1, you’re undermining my argument here

I'm done with Sense

There will be some Sense users, like yourself, who see the ML core of Sense as “crippling” and others who view it as a path to a simpler-to-deploy, more universally applicable and ultimately more informative method for energy use tracking. Circuit-level power measurement doesn’t go far enough (and look at the bill that your Utility sends you for another circuit-level solution!) and is more complex to deploy universally, for most. I for one have multiple devices on the same circuit. I would pon…

[samwooly1]

I’m sorry, I’m not following undermining?
Maybe I’m misunderstanding how I’m reading that because, in my mind, I would be bolstering the part about device behavior of individual components.
The way I see my panel is that is a circuit with individual circuits (breakers). Then each breaker, also being a circuit is broken down into more circuits (appliances). Then a refrigerator is it’s own circuit drilling down to the component level.
I thought your argument was directed in way that some people want a broader look at things (breakers) and others want to see things drilled down in detail as much as possible.
As you state at the end of that post, Sense does better to accomplish this than anything currently available. I completely agree.

[ixu]

I hope you saw the wink there.

Undermining in so far as what Sense does, to a greater extent, is inform us how much energy we’re using and helps to reduce usage. Your fridge light “solve” is interesting because you would argue, as would I, that it’s better to know the fridge door is open too long than save some watts by installing an LED and losing that feature. Others might say “See, Sense is encouraging people to use MORE energy”.

As far as the other thread goes, I guess I’m trying to get at the impossibility of Sense working as intended if people loose faith in the concept because the core of the Sense’s ability requires large scale data. Therein lies the conundrum.

[samwooly1]

@ixu

Therein lies the conundrum.

This is why it’s so upsetting to see unhappy users and those that say they are done. If the many before me had done the same and not stuck around, where would be my detections be?
The users that got in on this from the beginning had very few detections. So I’m thinking that a couple years down the road it will be similar for those coming after me. I saw two year user with 6 detections while I had 25 at a few months. Every user is also contributing.
@kevin1 did a write up some time ago that addressed this and was really good.
I wish I could find it now

[ixu]

Maybe …

Using Sense to save energy

I’m quite satisfied with Sense for three reasons: Reasonable expectations - I’m an electrical engineer and I have a rational view of how hard the problems are: Just accurately measuring AC split phase power with a couple of pairs of CT clamps. For those of you who say that this should be easy, you have never done a lab on measuring real and apparent power. Making sense of household power waveforms, given the ranges of device operation, the cacophony of different devices, plus induced noise fr…

Though I think you are referring to a Device-detection over time post.

[andy]

My refridge has led’s too, and the only part of it that Sense has reliably detected in a year is the ice maker distribution

[andy]

I totally agree with your positioning. That’s exactly how I view the world, and I already had very accurate house level monitoring (with its own web site) along with a very few individual device monitors. I bought Sense to drill down to the appliance/device level

[samwooly1]

I’m not much on merging devices except for the oven/stove. Something like the dishwasher or dryer I want to see how many minutes the heat runs of the cycle versus how long the total cycle is.
Unfortunately, the reset I did made me lose both the dryer and dishwasher along with their heating elements.

[len.turnbow]

That’s odd. Sense detected my fridge compressor early and accurately.

[samwooly1]

Before I reset, the fridge was detected for the compressor, light, defrost, ice maker and the door dispenser for water/ice.
I hope to get all of them detected again.