Nearly 5 months after a re-installation

Identifying Devices in Your Home
1

Just checking in after a long absence. In October I had to bugout of my lakefront home due to Lake Travis flooding in. First time since I bought a Sense, 4th time since built the house in 1996. No damage to house, it’s designed for it but I do have to pull electronics, empty garage, furniture, etc. which we have down to a fine art.
Unfortunately I didn’t make note of which lead of the Sense was clipped around which of the two 120v legs in the garage primary panel. After the lake receded, the walls dried out, I reinstalled all the zwave switches, wall sockets, grinder pump electronics(220v), lights, and the sense. After a few weeks of seeing very few devices recognized by sense (but some, accurately), I swapped the two leads. The number of devices added since then is very small.

Sense
Sense.png1440×2880 158 KB
Kind of amazed that nothing seems to be getting recognized. NOTE the size of “other”, this afternoon. I have a variety of heating sources - two separate split unit heat pumps, radiant heater, HVAC heat pumps including electric radiant boost depending on temp delta which one of which is active during the screen shot. After a year of sense it has never recognized my 65" Samsung flatscreen, Denon tuner, tablo recorder, several screen/blind motors, garage door opener, any lights (which are in sets of up to 6 ceiling cans), several computers, one which is on 24/7. The screen shot from tonite is after I went to each zwave thermostat and put a delta of more than 6 degrees so that each of the two HVAC heatpumps’ aux heatstrips, which are not recognized as devices, are on and consuming a huge amount of electricity.
I’m wondering if I would not be better off wiping everything from my Sense and letting it start anew. I realize the “always on” is well above average, which is not unexpected as I have a 3-story automated home with a variety of devices, such as a tablo, an Amazon Fire DVR, a Homeseer HS6 PC on 24/7, weather station, a variety of thermometers of the station, 5 LED wall socket flashlights that are always on charge and come on whenever electricity to the house dies. An extremely appreciated toilet bidet add-on that my wife will never do without again, preheats water for bidet functions, heats the seat 24-7, and has an LED 24/7. I could list several dozen separate electric devices that have either been lost circa the flood such as my 220v elevator, or never been ID’d by Sense. Would it be a better idea to wipe it all and start over?

2

Yikes, at least nothing was damaged in the flood! Just to make sure I’m fully understanding…

Prior to the uninstallation, device detection was working better (not perfectly, but better)? And now, even after swapping the CTs, it’s performing a lot worse than it did previously?

Sense is certainly picky about any changes that are made to its installation, so that does sound like it could be the culprit here. But it does sound like you have a lot of low-wattage devices in your home, and Sense doesn’t do a great job with those. Many of us here, myself included, are making use of smart plugs to monitor those.

3

My general sense is that the Sense’ abilities to detect have become dormant, although a week or so ago it “found” 3 different heaters, which apparently two of which are interchangeable in Sense although one is an aquarium heater and the other is a parabolic dish room heater. I was freaking out at work the day prior to posting this message because Sense was telling me the room heater was going on and off when I KNEW I had turned it off. So considering a wipe/reset might make it receptive to discovering more things including all the things, like an elevator, that it KNEW about but hasn’t seen it in months (ie, since the flood). Yeah, I realize the prominence for Sense detection is in part power presence, frequency of appearance in use, and maybe some kind of uniquity the device has electronically. Just don’t know. I think when I re-installed it, I had the two CTs correct, but then doubted myself and swapped them and then figured Sense was operating normally when it found some “thngs” it had already known about. Lots of things are MIA as I consider it now, though. I’ll reach out to tech support and ask their advice, since I must be in an unusual realm…

4

@texarc
Others will disagree with me but I think the power leads for sense are just important as the CT’s.
When reconnecting, I would connect to the same exact breaker and wire orientation (polarity) as before. I believe Sense also reads and takes measurements from these leads.
Another user with a situation similar to yours also had to do a reset after reconnecting and felt it was because the orientation of both CT’s and both power leads had changed.

5

To real “power” Sense reads both per phase current and per phase voltage. The result is what makes up the detection signatures. So, swapping either current sensors or voltage sensors (or both) disrupts the data. IMHO, moving the voltage leads to a different breaker as long as they are still on the same phase, shouldn’t affect the data at all. A breaker is a simple switch, connecting the bus bar to the wire terminal, and that shouldn’t affect the waveform shape at all.

1 Like
6

per your “Prior to the uninstallation, device detection was working better (not perfectly, but better)? And now, even after swapping the CTs, it’s performing a lot worse than it did previously?”
Absolutely yes, even though the Sense has undergone several (?) upgrades in software.

7

@andy
I understand that it shouldn’t have an effect but it depends what is being measured and the sensitivity. I had a detection on a heater on its own 15 amp breaker. I needed to change the breaker and nothing else. When I changed the breaker, I lost that detection. Nothing else change and I even went so far as to measure how far the wire was inserted into the original breaker and duplicated the same depth. If what your sayimg is correct then it should not have had any effect.
Even the smallest changes have an effect. Just like if you have a piece of wire 12" inches long and measure the resistance, it wont be the same in a wire a little longer or shorter in length.
When you turn on something high wattage and a slight flicker of the lights happen. They are on separate circuits but you can visually see something changed.
I don’t know the ins amd outs of what is measured but I witnessed the breaker change throwing sense off.

8

You read my mind. They can run some diagnostics so see what’s actually happening and what has changed from the previous install.

9

oddly enough, tech support tells me there is an option within the app on several screens where I can elect to choose an icon in the upper right corner of the screen to export data to .csv format. I cannot find any such options, using my Pixel 2XL running the app, which is apparently up to date. .

10

Only the web app has the export capability.

Looks like this:

57%20PM

Pick the time period you want to export first (Day, Week, Month, Year), then hit the export button. You’ll have a choice to export in Days or Hours.

1 Like
11

thanks - I will have a look. The tech support person insists it is the phone app so I had not gone to my laptop to try. MAKES a lot more sense to this old guy to dl to a hard drive instead of a phone. :slight_smile: I am also in serious doubt that my Sense is not losing some of its marbles. My “oven” has/had been reliable since identified prior to the flood, and after. But just now, it being OFF, the screen shows it is ON.

image
image.png657×737 26.5 KB
. Also, the “always on” has jumped to a ludicrous level. And the “Other” image has decided to disappear. NOT sure the Sense is running correctly… Hopefully tech support also watches these threads… and yes, just now brought it up on my laptop and the export icons are easily seen AND USED!. Since I changed my two HVAC heat pump systems from a 22-y.o. custom open lake water based system to standard American outdoor air-based heat pumps, I want very much to compare apples to apples next summer, and since the Pedernales Electric Coop system also provides electrical consumption for the entire house compared to the ambient temperatures at the time, I can see just what kind of hit I took in trade-off. I know the SEER of the water system was sky-high compared to the air based, but since some jackass commercial bass fisherman introduced the zebra mussel into Lake Travis, the use of submersible pumps without frequent cleaning/maintenance is more than I feel like adopting. Ironically, the water at depth SHOULD be clearer thanks to the razor-sharp mussels so that finding the pumps by braille and luck/time as it has in the past for me, where even at high-noon I could not see my fins due to the silt and muck would not be as hard… So I now have two nice csv files, one for 2018 and the other 2019, so I can compare data eventually. thanks!

1 Like
12

I will also note that their help and instructions are obviously easily confused between the phone app and the desktop app. The online instructions at https://help.sense.com/hc/en-us/articles/115008184227-When-should-I-reset-my-monitor- does not tell you that it only works from the phone app, not at all from the desktop version, just like the tech was telling me the export only works from the phone app.

The reset is done, and I’ll sit back and watch what happens. Can’t end up any worse, and maybe I’ll have better accuracy ID for devices, since I am running on a version that’s almost a year newer than what I started with. Eternal optimist, that’s me. :slight_smile:

2 Likes
13

Nice work - let us know how the reset goes. You have the essentials of your two past years and can even do analysis on them if you want to.

BTW - good luck with any additional cleanup. We had a couple of friends with places on Lake LBJ/Horseshoe Bay and they saw a fair amount of boat damage. Fortunately the homes stayed dry.

14

I’ll let the Support team know. Thanks for the heads up.

1 Like
15

This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.