I still have not had one light bulb detected by Sense. How hard will it be for Sense to even find my light bulbs as they are all 7 watts and then sometimes (like in the bathroom ) 3 of them always come one at the same time. How hard is it for Sense to detect these objects that can move around or take very little wattage to run?
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It’s real hard! I have more than 15 LED lights and after 15 months Sense found 1. I suspect the problem at the Sense factory is that devices that use a soft start or zero crossing turn-on technique are hard to ferret out of the day-to-day noise on the electrical conductors. Sense has not found my heat pump air handler, electrical stove top and numerous other high power consumption devices over the last 15 months, all soft start devices.
Sense has reliably detected my garage door opener and hot water heater. Sense gets confused occasionally and assigns an incorrect signature to a device that has previously been ID’d.
In time Sense may figure out some of the problems, but likely their VC funding will run out and all you will have is a $300 Wattmeter.
There have been weak promises that some of the cloud based identification will be passed back to the customers before the Sense company rolls over. Given the speed that access to the individual device owners data archiving feature has taken I hold out little hope in this area too.
You make it sounds like they are going under!! Is this just person opinion or what makes you think this?
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Personal opinion biased by the lack of progress in the device detection area in over a year.
Forums most often consolidate the negative views and are shy of viewers who have good news.
Last year Sense appeared to struggle with VC support and as I recall didn’t get a multi year opportunity.
Alan Kirk GMail
Sense hasn’t detected any LEDs at my place but it has done a great job picking up CFLs. Two bathrooms in my house have them around the bathroom mirror. It picks up each group of bulbs as one device so I have “master bathroom lights” and “guest bathroom lights” identified.
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Negative Nancy over here…
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In 14 months Sense has never detected any of our lights, halogen floods, halogen tub/shower, florescent tube, cfl, or led.
Worse is that it can’t seem to find big consumers of power like my well, stove,ovens, washer, dryer, etc
Wrong, if Sense folds we won’t even have a $300 wattmeter, because the app (and cruddy web application) are driven by their data servers…no Sense company, no servers.
So, you are simply spreading FUD here. Is this Facebook?
It’d be nice to have something more factual.
Please can someone from the Sense Labs company respond to this?
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Then something is wrong. It should readily find big motors, etc. it’s identified about 15 here. It also correctly identified a set of fluorescent lights in the workshop.
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Just look at the various sites that track VC investment, and make your own decisions.
I just wanted to know other peoples experiences with LED light bulbs 
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That’s easy to say. I looked, and didn’t see anything - but I’m not a vc expert, as you may be. Please show us some sites, facts, etc. Thank you
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Let me briefly chime in:
For the topic itself, LED bulbs are very hard to find because, as @1agkirk2 pointed out, they tend to look like noise. We are continuing to work hard on device detection (I know that I sound like a broken record here, but it’s true) and have some improvements specifically around LED bulbs in the works. I can’t really go into much more detail at the moment.
For the more tangential topic, Sense is doing well. We grew a ton last year and we’re continuing to grow and make improvements to Sense and the Sense user experience. I’m not worried about us suddenly closing up shop, and if I’m not, you really shouldn’t be. That said, in the incredibly unlikely event that did occur, yes, there would be issues with continued support for Sense devices. We’re of course not alone in that; it’s an unfortunately common problem with cloud-connected devices. But we are dedicated to making sure that in such an event, you would retain as much functionality as is possible. We have written publicly about this issue prior: If Your Company Shuts Down, Will My Sense Stop Working? - Sense Blog
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Sense has detected our bedroom lights (1 fixture with 3 Philips LED bulbs), our bathroom lights (1 fixture with 1 Philips LED bulb and one GE undercabinet LED fixture), and our basement lights (11 lampholders with 11 Ecosmart LED bulbs and 1 formerly-fluorescent fixture with magnetic ballast and T12 Philips LED lamp).
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Thanks @RyanAtSense It would be cool that if in the future new appliances could give out a signal to identify them for quantification purposes… Like light bulb turns on it would give out a signal then off gives out a signal to help identify it as a universal standard
at to the other subject, glad to hear was not the point of my post but glad to hear!
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Zero detection, in 15 months
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Best of luck…today I became an ex-customer, entirely due to the failure of Sense to provide any value, much less meet the marketing claims. That’s not a good outcome.
That would be fantastic and definitely, definitely, definitely make our jobs infinitely easier
and @andy, I’m sorry to hear that. Despite Sense’s shortcomings (inevitable with the magnitude of our undertaking), most of our users are able to find value in the product. It may not be perfect (what tech that relies on machine learning is?), but we are working constantly to improve it day by day, and have made great strides. Unfortunately, some issues seem to persist in certain homes over others. Feel free to reach out to me if there’s anything I can do to help.
You have been quite helpful during our saga, as well as a number of your colleagues. Unfortunately, this product hasn’t worked for us over two different Sense systems and more than 15 months of trying, so we’re throwing in the towel. This wasn’t a support issue, it’s a HUGE difference between the vision/promises and the product reality. And, if it’s getting better, you certainly can’t prove that by our experience
My objectives were pretty simple (way easier than your marketing claims!), and should have been well within the scope of Sense. We already had a fairly sophisticated home monitoring system (welserver.com), but with limited device by device tracking due to its architecture and the costs of adding individual device wattmeters. We do already have on/off monitoring of some major systems, like well pump (Sense failed at that, despite a VERY unique power signature!), GeoThermal heating system components (Sense only picked up one blob covering a half dozen systems), hot water heating (Sense kinda’ got that, but put the power into “Other” as often as it did the Hot Water Heater device), multi-zone radiant (Sense zero), Mini-duct aux heat and cooling (Sense zero), Solar system (Sense did pick that right up, and has been pretty accurate…about 4.6% error…compared to WelServers .8%), etc, etc. So, we’re pretty well monitored (and very accurate) for on/off but I bought Sense for data. Unfortunately it failed utterly providing that.
All I wanted from Sense was to get some individual device power monitoring, and only then for the big consuming devices. The fact that it never found my garage door openers (as promised by your marketing), any lighting what-so-ever (also promised by your marketing), etc really didn’t matter….those are already tiny almost inconsequential parts of our power story.
Never accurately found washer, dryer, water heater, stove, oven, refridge, radiant distribution, mini-duct HVAC, etc. So, I finally gave up.
Oh well
Andy