So it seems to me that given that you have access to historical data over the lifetime of a device, it ought to be possible to sense impending failure - at least for devices like larger motors, where the start capacitor tends to fail. I’m imagining that the power factor shifts during startup as the capacitor ages, which would allow some interesting fault diagnosis…
It also ought to be possible to sense arcing …
This is something we’ve worked on a bit already, Paul. We’re currently testing a HomeCheck service so we can get good information on this. You can read about that here: Introducing Sense HomeCheck
You also may want to check in the Share Your Sense Stories subforum, as there’s lots of stories like that: Share your Sense stories - Sense
I’ve visually seen a couple appliance fail - our fridge (just needed the coils cleaned) and our water heater (which had a heating element fail).