Sense is alerting me to this.
If changes in weather and the runtime of HVAC systems were incorporated maybe we could filter some of these out as expected.
Weather in my zipcode the last few days.
Agreed, however, I installed my Sense in December and it hasn’t had much time to detect my two mini-splits and my central A/C. Right now it doesn’t know I have A/C and can’t say that’s why the spike happened. However, this could be a good thing. Looking at temperature increases, or decreases, and seeing a spike, it could say that A/C, or heat, was most likely used and really start focusing on those devices.
Agreed, the detection of my AC has been rough in >2 years. However they could hook into my ecobee or other smart thermostat and see how long they were calling for cooling.
I spoke ever so soon. Sense did just deter my central air on the second floor. We’ve had it going for roughly a month now. We turned it on on May 15th for the first time, but only for that one day. It wasn’t until the 24th where we turned it on regularly. So Sense took a little over two weeks of regular use, or 3.5 weeks total to detect it.
I do have two mini split AC units, and I’ve read those are a lot more difficult to detect, but we’ll see how those go.
@brian5, the problem in our house is our two AC systems seem to be too similar to each other to be detected properly. Sense knows “a condenser” is running or “an air handler” but it can’t figure out if it is the upstairs or downstairs system. It really needs that extra help from ecobee integration to know which unit started running when.
The upstairs system is I think a 3 ton system while the downstairs is I think a 2.5 ton system. I think we’re going into our 3rd year with Sense and it hasn’t been able to differentiate them well.
I have a 3 ton and a 4 ton single-stage compressor and Sense is finally able to differentiate the two, probably with a little help from the Ecobee history. Sense still seems to be challenged by many hour runtimes - perhaps it’s timeout period is something like 4 hours.
