Three and a half years after installing Sense, it has finally ‘detected’ my EV.
We have two EVs and Level 2 48A charger on a time of use rate. A couple of times a week, from midnight to about 6am there is a constant 48A (12kW) load as one of these charges. Its very poor that Sense has taken this long to identify the load. I had actually given up on Sense because the touted load identification is pretty limited and the lack of ability to detect an obvious load tells me its a waste of time.
As a glorified smart meter it does it job, but not well enough to justify any decisions on usage/consumption.
For me, Sense was pretty quick (a couple of weeks) to detect my Model Y that charges each night in off-peak hours. But other common appliances like my stove and dryer, not so much. I think it comes down to being data-driven and it needs sufficient data to detect and identify a power usage pattern. That, along with being able to identify a device amongst the “noise” of other devices.
Ive got a Prius Prime and after three years, 2 in our old house and over a year in the new house sense still can’t report my charging usage. I just had a chat with cust servuce and they said that Sense doesn’t support the Prius Prime at the moment. That is so bogus and irresponsible of this company to not be able to identify the most widely used EV around beside the Tesla. In my old house i had to jury rig a real funky setup by splitting the two 110v legs from my panel and hook up 2 Tplink smart sensor modules and put them in line with the charger using a y cable to the charger and that’s the only way that sense was able to read the usage. Coroorate’s stubborness to not sllow users to “tag” and report their own devices has kept them from building the database that would solve these problems. Closed minded thinking. Why is it that We can see the need for reporting but they still cant to this day. Honestly, i have used sense in many ways but it’s been vecause ive jumped thru hoops to get it done
@stoneatti, I agree on your thought on prioritization - tackle the EVs with the biggest footprint in the marketplace first. Also like what you did with TP-Link.
But your whole second half flies in the face of what is feasible, at least when doing realtime detection. It’s not “stubbornness” - the issue is that some users, like yourself, want to believe in solution that can’t possibly work technically. The proof:
Two companies that offer a product similar to Sense’s, but with a “training mode” as you describe, have gone out of business. One of the main reasons is that “training mode” did NOT work.
Most users are clueless when they talk about the “database” or library of devices that Sense maintains. One of the biggest issues is variation within on and off transitions (they are never exactly the same). Doing fuzzy matching is much harder than you think and relies on a large statistical database rather than a few training cycles that users seem to thing would do the trick. If you want further discussion on the technical feasibility of “training mode” read this end-to-end first. How Sense does “Native Detection” Work ? - User Perspective
My EV had not shown up after a long time (maybe a month or so). I do have an issue with my charger and heat so the current fluctuates wildly throughout a charge, which I attribute to the issue. I went ahead and bought the add-on module (solar/etc.) and used it for this specific purpose because knowing the undisputable, exact behavior of the largest electricity draw in my house was important to me.
I do have a weird issue where now I see another “phantom” “EV” in Sense that uses exactly 50% of the "MAXIMUM* draw of an EV charge, and only shows up sometimes but that sometimes is never when the EV is not charging - so it is detecting something about the EV additional to the leads on the EV line. It is very strange. I have wondered if it might be related to a wiring fault of some sort.