Introducing Sense HomeCheck

Hey all,

We’re excited to announce that we’re testing a new service call Sense HomeCheck! If you’re an experiencing an electrical malfunction of some kind, we can help investigate with the power of Sense data. Suspect that an appliance is malfunctioning? Have an unusually high electric bill? Experiencing unexplained outages? Solar inverters seem off? We can dig in! Just submit a report here: Introducing Sense HomeCheck and we’ll be in touch. As we gather data about different issues, Sense will begin to detect certain types of malfunctions automatically.

And just something to keep in mind: we’ll be prioritizing reports that come in based on severity, likelihood that we can assist, and prevalence of this type of issue, so please be patient!

I know sense is likely very proud of this service and likely just the bridge to bigger an better services Sense has planned, but to be honest my first thought was “I wish they were focused more on getting the current product working better”.

The new features recently announced are good. They help us align data better to how people live.

However, I have not really seen any updates to the underlying issues of device detection, accuracy and consistency and no real plan to how they will be addressed.

I am less concerned about getting the device perfect when Sense finds it as I can deal with initial device identification. However after I spend the time to identify a device it should not change or get confused with other devices. I have seen this happen with most of my devices over time and its exceptionally frustrating to the point where I do not want to spend any more time identifying a device only to have it stop working or get confused with another device.

Depending on the season 70-90% of my electrical usage is still unknown to sense (air conditioning accounts for the 20% gap). The identified portion of 10-30% is very inaccurate. After spending hours to nail down a device, a few months later Sense becomes confused. That specific stage of your dishwasher cycle you though you had figured out now becomes a coffee pot. And your Washing machine becomes a vacuum or unknown again.

My point to this is how can sense focus on advanced levels of electrical diagnosis when it cant get the basics right? I hope Sense does not believe the current product is ready for the next step as that is not my experience. Sense should focus its team on stabilizing and improving the current gaps in capabilities.

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I completely agree.

I wonder how many requests for a web interface have been submitted. And why we still don’t have one.

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@johndellarciprete, totally understand the thinking there. I want to mention that we will be using the data here to automate fault detection algorithms that every Sense user will be able to take advantage of. This is just the process of kicking off of that feature.

In terms of device detection updates, it is a little harder to communicate those the way that I can with clear features that everyone can see at the same time. I can say that device detection processes have really improved a lot over the past 6 months. We’ve added new device models and made some big improvements to existing ones. As an example, some users may begin to see TVs detected over the coming weeks thanks to some hard work by our data science team (and participation of Sense users in the NDI program). So while it may seem that the focus is not on device detection improvements, it very much is. We’ve also continued to expand our data science team to accelerate these improvements and expect many more detection improvements to come.

If you’re experiencing an unknown of 70%-90%, I strongly recommend reaching out to our support team (https://help.sense.com/hc/en-us/requests/new) so that they can take a closer look at your data.

@austxchris, we’re working on a web interface and expect to have a new update for the beta web app in the next couple weeks! Sorry for the delay.

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