@TCoupe , welcome, welcome !
When you said Sense “found” your furnace, did you get an alert in “Timeline”. If so, you should also have a hew device (besides Always On) in your Device list. You can go to the new France device and fill in more details via the Settings “gear” on the upper right.
This is kind of what the Settings will look like, though this is for my Furnace that is on a smart plug (Hence the TP-Link name and MAC address). You can rename the Furnace to be more specific and give Make/Model plus the location. But don’t don’t go overboard on naming and details - make sure this and all others are steady device detections. Sometimes it is good to wait a couple days on each new detection.
Hi, I’m Simon, Sense is part of a long habit of trying to automate everything. Joined here once I figured out I’m going to need help to get everything identified
Hello, I have been using Sense for a couple of months now. I like it so far. I bought it to try to determine why my power bill/usage is so high compared to my neighbor/normal usage. I have noticed spikes in power usage, though so far even with electricians looking into it I have not gotten the problem resolved. Fingers crossed it will be found eventually.
Welcome @ury2ok2000 ! How long do the spikes last ? If they last long enough, you might be able to set an alert, then run to your breaker box and individually toggle them off until the spike disappears.
I did just now set an alert. They seem to start around 9am and go until about 7-8AM. They last up to 10 minutes. I was able to reproduce at my thermostate by setting the heat up which activated step 1 and 2 (which as i understand step 2 is emerg heat). When in step 1 and 2 is when the spike occurs. At just step 1 it seems to be the expected wattage pull (around 3-4K watts or so).
3-4kW for a heater? do you have a multi-stage heat pump OR baseboard strip heaters? those would use a lot of power like that… but a normal conventional hvac heater using nat gas should be less than 500W… my simple rooftop unit only uses 160W with a natural gas heater, single stage…
Hello Everyone here at Sense!! My name is Joe and I go by the name Joeteck. Look me up. I have been chosen by Sense months ago to do a product review of this product! I purchased the device on Amazon at first, and it took many weeks to have Sense realize that Amazon sent a return that wasn’t reset. But I digress. Then they requested me to return it to Amazon nad they would send one for free with The Solar option. I will be posting a question in the Solar section because as of right now, sucks terrible. I cant get it to work. App is horrible to setup Solar.
To make a long story short, the review is complete. Great product, until Solar.
Any way, thanks for any response. I will be a continue to be a contributor
Hi All, my name is Kris. I just purchased my sense and am eager to get it set up. I ran into some issues and am looking forward to posting some pictures to get some thoughts on how to get it up and running. I recently purchased a home and energy prices have doubled 6months after the purchase so trying to be wiser on my electric usage and ultimately make a switch to solar!
Hello! We installed sense flex ~1.5 months ago and I figure it is time to start decipering devices and energy usage. We have a large home, fairly new to us (1.5 years), and the previous owners didn’t give a hoot about energy usage. We are looking to reduce usage and get solar in the next 1-5 years. It looks like Sense needs a lot of help figuring out devices, which is fine. We are tech people and we weren’t expecting “magic”. The “AC” (in Dec?) is probably our main (propane) furnace, lol. Except we have 2 systems (where’s the other?). Hasn’t recognized the fridge, except when we turned a 2nd one on for 2 weeks over the holidays. We have 3 pumps - 1 is likely the well pump, another might be part of the dishwasher (which is a separate device as well) and the 3rd might be the washing machine. “Heat 1” has neglible usage. It does recognize the microwave and water heater. Hasn’t figured out either of our 2 ovens though. I’m happy to use smart plugs and circuit breakers (and excel) to try and figure it all out. I’m hoping there are similar technical/community experiences here.
As a techie, I think you’ll have some fun from what you see from Sense, plus learn much more about your usage. Three things I would suggest for folks who want to get the most out of their Sense
Patience and a bit of sleuthing - both of those should help you to identify and detect most of the big ticket items in your house. But every houses’ detection “mileage” varies - native detection (including EV detection) finds 8 of the biggest 9 users in my house with the other one coming from a smart plug (actually switch). What’s detected is a function of the types of devices in your house and how well they fit the Sense native detection models, how noisy (or not) your house is and whether you can take advantage of other forms of detection (smart plugs, Hue integration, and Ecobee integration).
Hmm. I’ve posted before, but now I don’t seem to be able to create a new post in any category. I’m Rick, and I live in Burbank. I’m an electrical engineer and professional iOS developer. I have a bespoke home automation system using a number of different technologies and platforms, as well as DIY solar (and ESS coming soon).
Just moved into a 20yr old much larger house than our previous one. Got our first $600 energy bill and immediately bought sense to see what was going on.
Results have been mixed. Currently trying to diagnose why sense never matches my Cleco Smart meter wattage.
Some techniques for doing apples-to-apples correlation between Sense and your Cleco smart meter.
Plus some of thee reasons that Sense doesn’t initially match up - look for the comparisons with “after” in the first columns. Those were all cases where the numbers initially didn’t match up.
It will take some time to ‘learn’ and i helped that by putitng in some TP-Link smart plugs on things that i wanted to know the usage and wanted to make sure were always on, like all by fridges and freezers…i also did the water heater and some network gear…Dehumidifiers i did as well so i could schedule when they run…
Hope you find some answers and save some coins…
