Native Detection vs KASA

Identifying Devices in Your Home
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New detection on Induction Cooktop, however:

Sense

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KASA Smartplug

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You don’t say what the question is, so I’ll just give some thoughts. Based on the Kasa history, you ran your Induction Cooktop for 18 minutes. The heating element came on and off frequently during the first 7 minutes, then stayed on for about 6 minutes straight, then flickered again for 4 minutes, and finally coasted for the last minute.

Based on what the Sense history, the Cooktop flickered for 8 minutes, then was off for 5 minutes, and flickered again for 4 minutes, for a total of 17 minutes. You are probably concerned with the 5-minute period in the middle when the unit was ON in Kasa but OFF in Sense. You are probably not concerned about the small baseline usage that occurred during the last minute.

The explanation for those missed minutes in the middle is that all native Sense device definitions include a certain piece of timing information saying how long the device typically runs. This is used as a safety against missed OFF events. For example, the fan on my natural gas water heater typically runs for 10-20 minutes. When Sense sees that the device has been ON for over an hour, it switches the status to OFF since the cycle surely finished long ago. That is very helpful in the case of my water heater, because the OFF event is easy to miss. The water heater never runs for an hour solid, so this trap for such conditions represents the behavior intended by the programmers who wrote the AI engine.

The time limit is not so helpful in the case of your Cooktop. The artificial intelligence engine didn’t see any 6-minute runs in the data it evaluated when coming up with the definition. It only saw lots of flickering. It therefore assigned a short time to the maximum duration field (about 30 seconds in your case). This causes the local Sense box to mark the device as OFF even if it hasn’t seen the drop in energy use that it was expecting. That is the explanation of why Sense missed 5 of the 6 minutes of that long run in middle of your history.

You are probably wondering what to about this. I see several options:

  1. Keep the Kasa. You can go into settings for this Kasa plug and mark the native device as What’s Plugged In. Then events like this will no longer bother you because they won’t even show up.
  2. Accept it. The native definition you got is better than nothing, so just call it good enough. This will let you move the Kasa integration somewhere else. As a bonus, the AI engine might tweak your definition behind the scenes, meaning that future 6-minute ON events are no longer missed.
  3. Delete it. The AI engine may try again with a new definition. The new definition may have a longer “max” time than the first one, especially if you boil pots of water on HIGH a few times a day during the next week or two.
  4. Ask support. I don’t know if they can tweak the “max” time manually, but it might not hurt to ask.
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I know WHY it did it.

Just documenting what Sense is missing for others.

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