Hi…My name is Mike and I have a love/hate relationship with my Sense Energy Monitor…
On a serious note, I love the transparency and visibility that Sense gives me to my energy usage (and in real-time no less)! They have a saying that you manage what you measure…and pre-Sense I had no real way of measuring my consumption, and as a result, had no real way of managing my usage…
Sure, my utility bill would come once a month… And if I logged onto my utilities website I could get my daily usage metrics… But without the ability to see my usage in real-time, the only thing I could conclude with daily and monthly metrics was simply to tell myself (and my household) to use less energy… That’s it.
Now comes the hate part…
While I love that Sense allows me to manage and tweak my energy consumption, I think it has resulted in a negative impact on my overall quality of life.
With a real-time meter, I am able to sniff out stuff that I was never able to sniff out. That extra monitor that I use for work to better multi-task…do I need it all the time? Why do I keep it on all day? It’s burning ~80W just sitting there doing nothing when I am not actively using it. That power strip sitting behind my master bedroom television setup…the one that I only use for 2 hours in the evening… It’s burning ~50W all day long, just to be ready for me to turn it on for 2 hours later that evening? Those air purifiers that I run 24x7 on medium. Do I really need to have them on 24x7? And does the extra energy burned by setting it to medium make sense? Maybe I should run them for a third of the time (8 hours a day) and at low.
All of this increases the mental calories that I have to burn every day… I now find my self crawling under furniture to turn off/off power strips, turning my work-at-home monitor on and off during the day based on need and questioning how much longer should I keep that space heater on. I am more energy efficient for sure. However, my life has become less convenient and less comfortable.
I love my Sense… But sometimes it’s true what they say… ignorance can be bliss…