New Members/Old Members: Introduce yourself!

#31

Hey guys and gals. My name is Todd. I live outside of Denver with a unique home that sits on top of a mountain at 8000 feet. I do have solar, but with our climate no air conditioning. I also have solar water heating that I use for heating house and heating domestic water. I am a true believer in Sense. I installed it Feb this year and it learned most all my critical devices. My average utility bill was roughtly $80/month averaged over the year prior to Sense. I have now been 4 straight months with a $5/month bill, which is the lowest it will be as this is the connection fee. How we did it…three things. Turned down hot tub temperature, use dryer only when sun is out, and use delay setting on dishwasher to run during the day. I am looking forward to this winter so see if I can continue the trend. Only down side is that I am somewhat driving my wife crazy about consuming energy. After a couple months with reduced bills, she is slowly getting over it.

BBQ - Love it all. Especially one of those texas style briskets.

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#32

Thanks so much for this extensive writeup. I’ll do a bit more research into all of it.

@todd.mikulenka welcome! I’m glad to hear that Sense has been treating you well. And I’ll be smoking a nice brisket this weekend :beers:

#33

@todd.mikulenka can you go here and give some more details about your solar?

Tell me about your solar

#34

I’m Paul we live in Kansas City. We just added solar (8.25KW) to the house and included Sense in the install. It’s been up and running a little over a week and has discover 5 devices. AC, Garage Door, Dryer, Coffee Pot and Fridge. Waiting for the power company to approve the install and swap meters so we can turn the panels on, the wait is killing me. I was a little surprised how good our always on is at 148. Also added a Tesla Model 3 recently as well, so fun to see that draw happen.

KC, well BBQ is pretty much everywhere here and I love it all.

3 Likes
#35

Hello There. Installed Sense over the weekend. Finished the calibration process and its been about 24hrs. Sense detected a device Heat1 and I am still trying to figure out what it might be.
Hopefully over next few days we start finding more devices.

Question - is there a way we can self identify devices by turning them on and off and tagging them. This way we can speed up the process of detection.

1 Like
#36

Welcome!

You’ll find the answer to your question spelled out at length here: Why can’t you train Sense?

#37

Hi. I’m a relatively new Sense user. I’ve got a power hog central AC unit that Sense has convinced me to upgrade (but is still struggling to identify), more computers than is reasonable in one house and a completely zwave enabled light/switching system running from Home Assistant open source software (which integrates nicely with Sense). I’m an IT Security consultant, guitarist, and amateur radio operator, the latter two making me probably one of the rare “vacuum tube” power signature users with Sense :slight_smile:

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#38

Welcome!

And if I didn’t just offload my tube gear for a nice solid state preamp to pair with my recording monitors (small apartment life :frowning_face:), I’d also be a member of the Sense-users-with-vacuum-tubes club.

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#39

Another Tuber here! 1934 Zenith Super Hetrodyne Radio Receiver console - bought new by my grandfather off the showroom floor.

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#40

Hi, all,
My PhD is in Computer Science. I am very interested in discrete optimization (NP-hard problems). I work for TransUnion, developing software for hard optimization problems. That involves lots of matching, entity-resolution, pattern-recognition, and machine-learning algorithms.

I just installed the hardware last weekend, in my own house, and am exploring the web site while I am waiting for it to start doing something useful. So far, I seem to have a fancy amp-meter on my main feeder wires.

I see why device-discovery is a hard problem. Matching an individual signal to known forms, even when there is no background noise, is a hard problem by itself. Detecting a time-varying signal in a knapsack of other signals would be an NP hard problem, even if all of the possible signals were already known. So I will be surprised if the approach ever works.

I had a TED system installed on this house, for about a decade. That didn’t try to be smart. It just had a bunch of induction coils, that could each measure one load. A pair of coils per-major-appliance, and a pair for the mains, solved the device-identification problem a-priori. (The pair of wires that go the the air-conditioner, had their own induction coils, so there was no signal-identification problem to solve.) The TED system had a problem, though. It communicates over the power lines, and trips arc-fault circuit breakers.

The only advantage that Sense seems to have, so far, is that it does not seem to trip arc-fault breakers.

#41

I’m an IT Director living in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve worked in high-tech, and financial services.

I installed my first Sense monitor last weekend, which went very smoothly. We have a large home with 3 main 200A panels, so I’ve only got one currently monitored. It has many appliances drawing power, including geothermal units, Lutron Homeworks Interactive, etc. I’ve recently added additional home automation (Alexa dots, Smartthings hub, z-wave switches,…).

We are trying to get a handle on our high electric bills and usage, and Sense seems like a step in the right direction. Ultimately I will need 3 monitors to cover our entire home, and am interested in having Sense aggregate those into a single account, so am waiting on that capability, before adding the additional monitors.

1 Like
#42

Welcome! Sense does need some time to start detecting your devices, given all the data it needs, so some patience is required up front. You’re totally right about the difficulty of the problem, but we have many users who are quite satisfied with the detection in their homes. While it’s not perfect (though I can’t think of an ML-based device that is…ahem, Siri/Alexa/Face ID who drive me insane continually), it’s getting better all the time.

@rick Welcome! While we don’t yet have multi-monitor support, we do have data export available via the Web App and you can manually aggregate from there.

It sounds like both of you would be interested in the Data Analysis subforum. Shoot me a message if you’d like access: New Category: Data Analysis

#43

I’ll join in here. My name’s Patrick and I live in Annapolis, MD. I’m an electrical engineer and work in the IT/datacenter industry. Like many, my foray into home automation began with X10 back when I was a kid. My current home control/monitoring interests include security, energy efficiency, fault monitoring, and remote access. I use SmartThings with a variety of different Zigbee and Z-wave devices for lighting automation, (rudimentary) security, and temperature/leak monitoring. I use Nest thermostats and smoke detectors tied in with SmartThings to automate various HVAC tasks such as fresh air control. Hikvision cameras and Ubiquiti network gear is in the mix as well.

As for Sense, I find myself using it mainly for remote monitoring of what’s going on at home. I’m away from home often, so it’s good to be able to check in to see that, for example, the refrigerator is still cycling and the well pump is not cycling. It’s also good to get some insight into which devices are energy hogs. I’ve had pretty much as-expected luck with device detection. Sense ID’d almost all of my basic resistive and inductive loads that are used on a regular basis, but nothing with a switching power supply, which is a bummer.

One of my most unusual and satisfying moments with Sense was being able to prove to a shoddy HVAC contractor that their technician did not pull a vacuum on my newly installed AC system. Combined with security video, it was clear from the Sense data that they never hooked their vacuum pump up, just purged the system to atmosphere and hit the road.

1 Like
#44

Hello!

I work for Monetate as a Solutions Engineer.

I got my Sense on the 2 days ago and installed it last night (on my own :sunglasses: )

I was brought here to become part of something that I am very excited about potentially advancing and to learn about how much energy my Model 3 asks for when charging.

Lots of smart home tech including Chamberlain garage door opener, Nest thermostat/cameras, three Echo’s, many many Hue bulbs, Sonos. I am most likely missing something.

Barbeque? I prefer to use the smoker

I do have Twitter (@evanacree) but don’t use it too heavily. More of an Instagram guy (@evanacree & @Evs_EV).

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#45

Welcome, Evan! Glad to have you aboard.

And I’m all about the smoker :+1:

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#46

I’ve been using Sense for almost 4 weeks now. Wanted to get it forever or make my own. Couldn’t justify the cost to buy it but now that we moved into our new house and I plan on getting solar, I have a reason to drop $300 on it.
3700 sf, 2 story house with two Goodman AC units. Big devices not detected so far are my Samsung RFG298 fridge/freezer, LG washer. and LG LDF6920ST dishwasher. All came with the house. There are exactly 100 bulb sockets in our house. These are permanent ones, not including desk/table/floor lamps. No lights have been detect since removing all the incandescents.
When the house is at rest we run between 400-500w. When it’s occupied in the evenings it can balloon up to around 1000w.
We pay around $0.12 for power in High Point, NC and they have a “buy all - sell all” system for solar. No net metering. So they will buy back at about $0.03
Came from Washington and so I’m actually very disappointed and amazed on how solar unfriendly this area is.
Thinking about going off Grid.

1 Like
#47

Welcome, Jason! 4 weeks is still pretty early in the Sense universe, so you should get more detections in the coming weeks and months, including (likely) so of those big consumers.

#48

What brought you here?
This Old House!
How long have you been using Sense? April 2018
What do you do for work? Information Security at a Fortune 50 Company
What other smart home tech do you have? Leviton Decora switch and dimmers, Ring doorbell and chime, ChargePoint Home, soon to be some TP-Link outlets. I also have some old school home automation with motion sensing switches for my laundry room, garage, hallway off of the hall and pantry.

I also have a 10kw SunPower Solar array with SunPower Monitoring and a 2018 Honda Clarity PHEV.

What’s your favorite type of barbecue? I’m in Texas so it’s smoked no sauce here lol :joy:

1 Like
#49

My name is Brandon, and I have been a user of sense for about a year or so. I had installed solar and wanted better real-time monitoring, predictions, usage stats, and production stats, with the ability to share that information to other programs.

I am a heavy smart home user. SmartThings, Hue, Harmony Hub, HA, Alexa, Nest, Sense, RPi’s everywhere. Also an avid Home Theater user, and try to cross the border between smart home and home theater as much as possible, but I am just now getting into learning about API’s and the code.

I work as a Traffic Management Center Operator and 9-1-1 dispatcher.

As far as BBQ I vote Fire Department Chicken BBQ all the way.

2 Likes
#50

Welcome @reeftank10 and @phideltdexter!

Great to have a couple more smart home :nerd_face:s around.

@phideltdexter I’d love to hear more about what you’re doing with RPi (and if you’re merging them into your home theater in some way).