Reaching my second month. Too cheap to run my AC in South Louisiana, I sprung for a dehumidifier. My Air Conditioner is oversized anyway and will cool the air but not control the humidity very well.
My Dehumidifier runs like clockwork. the same pattern every time. took Sense a week to detect the compressor, but never the blower motor inside the unit. Finally, today, I woke up and Sense has discovered the blower motor. My Dehumidifier is complete… (except the led display thing like on digital alarm clocks, but who cares about that).
At its peak (not the startup peak) it uses 59Watts… I realize that’s small. But compared to my always on… it hasn’t been.
I merged them… then on second thought. I don’t know, it’s kind of nice knowing which component runs when. Not as important as the blower for my HVAC unit, but still.
And that’s everything I can reasonably expect Sense to detect at this point. Every other appliance is either gas, low low wattage (alarm clock), or runs so sporadically/inconsistently. Maybe it will find my teapot, it has discovered other things that I hadn’t ran in 2 months.
Unless they have a spark igniter for when the gas first turns on, they’ll use a glow plug to ignite the gas. This can draw up to 500 watts for as long as the gas is turned on, or only for the first few seconds after the gas comes on.
Either way, a gas appliance, be it a furnace, stove, or dryer, can draw considerable power.
I’m sorry. I misspoke. the gas dryer has something associated with it. but my stove uses a spark. water heater has a pilot. the furnace might use a glow “plug”. it clicks a few times before igniting, but visual observation shows what I would consider a wire heated up to the point of glowing in front of the gas.
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Now I wonder about the crazy unnamed devices that ran for very little time so randomly that I can’t even find them in the usage chart. perhaps the glow plug for the furnace… can’t really check it though because winter is over.
It looks to me like gas appliances also have some kind of electrically controled valve.
Both our gas furnace and gas dryer each have an identical, related signature identified as a valve of some kind. It appears at the same time as flame ignition.
i wonder why I forgot about the valve lol. as if the gas is continually flowing rather it’s lit or not. lol.
(p.s. not being sarcastic. sincerely… how did I not think about the valve)
Correct, they do, and gas valve/ignitors are almost identical across devices. Then the furnace has blower (or pumps) and the dryer has motor, so the combined effect should be pretty different.