@ryancshanahan, we are in Central Texas. Plan is to add solar. Roof was designed for weight, electrical subpanel was installed with loads for battery backup, and wiring from roof installed. Just need $ for solar. Construction was more expensive then we planned.
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Hi, I’m Tasmin. A tinkerer, mom, water engineer. Our power usage has been creeping up and now that we have all been at home since March, things have gotten entirely out of hand with my PG&E (Norcal) time of day tiered pricing. I’m a Smartthings refugee and Kickstarter supporter, now on Hubitat. I couldn’t install Sense on my main panel because PG&E smart meter has the top half locked out, but I put it on a sub panel for the extension which seems to be about 90% of my energy usage anyway.
Looking to figure out the power hogs and set better rules around time of day usage at least until school and work actually are back in person.
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Welcome,
I’m a PG&Eer too, and my electrician cracked open the meter panel so I could put Sense CTs on the pre-meter mains. And if you want to play with ToU calculations, you can export your Sense billing period data and try the calculator referenced here:
My electrician is too much of a Boy Scout and refused
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Hi, I’m Bill and have had Sense installed about 2 weeks and so far Sense has discovered a couple electric radiant floor heating systems, our furnace, toaster oven, microwave and a 300 watt array of lights which were quickly swapped for lower cost LEDs. Im trying to track down a motor which just appeared overnight. Very interesting reading the community posts and seeing what others are discovering with their Sense systems.
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Hello, I’m Gerardo Clark, retired from Schneider-Electric, TX on last May '20 and have enjoyed being a Sense user since I installed it back in Nov 2019. My background is power and worked as an electrical engineer for my entire career life, so I feel that I am at the right forum.
Almost a year now and it detected 21 devices, hope to see more coming soon.
What I see as a challenge is whether it will identify all the consumptions coming from the Samsung refrigerator, inverter type. The goal is to merge them all under a unique label, i.e. refrigerator.
Looking forward to going solar sometime in the near future.
Hope to keep learning from this community.
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Hi, Joshua Cope I am an electrical engineer. I work for Volvo cars in SC. I have a home built in 2018. I started out with Samsung smart things. I use kasa, Ring, Reolink, Ecobee, and Alexa devices. I have 11.5 kw of solar and an EV (2013 leaf).
I installed sense with solar in august 2020 and so far have 11 devices detected. I plan to add a lot of kasa smart plugs to finish detecting some of my heavy users and always on devices.
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@torchme68, just pick the right Kasa plugs that work with Sense (today HS110 and HS300) and don’t use over 20 plugs.
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Greetings. JB here from the Chicago US area. I got a Sense about a month ago, but only installed it 3 days ago. The ‘long’ story is, I opened the electrical panel and found some corrosion in the box. Apparently when my house was built, it was not code/required to seal the openings to the outside, around the electrical box. We’ve had a couple of major snow storms over the past several years, and some of that snow made it into the basement, on top of the electrical panel (that’s the reason for the corrosion). In any event, it turned out to be a much more expensive project than I had anticipated (I had to replace the panel first …). All is good now. The Sense is installed and working as expected. Now, I want to add a couple of dedicated CT sensors to track usage of the Furnace/AC … my kids tend to turn those devices at will. My furnace/AC uses two breakers … does that mean I need to use both CTs for the furnace? I was hoping to use only one, and then the other for another circuit.
The Sense has been running for 3 days now, and it has already detected the fridge, oven, and sump pump. I also added a couple of HS300 for more ‘dedicated’ monitoring.
You can run multiple hot wires through a CT and you’ll simple get the sum of the current for those circuits. Current flow all needs to be in the same direction. There are several posts where this is discussed. Welcome to the fun!
I suppose I’ve never properly introduced myself.
I’m Ross. I live in Chesterfield Va and it seems like I have found my people here. My home was built in 1973 and it’s been fun bringing it into the current century.
This all started with two stupid wifi RGB bulbs so I could turn on a light in my master bedroom hallway. Now I have a dedicated network for all of my smart devices. From there I’m running towards a full smart home it seems. Sense was a logical next step. I think I’m a lost cause now.
I’m looking at building a cabin in the next few years, sense with solar power will be in my next chapter.
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Ah, the classic journey from upgraded lightbulbs to a complete IoT home. Welcome, @Rjenk0s. Happy to have you here. Reach out with any questions that come up.
A post was merged into an existing topic: Sense New User Resources & Guides
Brand new here from Massachusetts, where electric rates are high 
About 5 years back or our old style electric meter was replaced by a new meter and ever since our electric bills have been exorbitant. We do have a large family (6 people), do our fair share of laundry and dishes, but we have no pool/spa, etc. and have always been wondering where the electricity is going. We have a Kill-a-Watt a couple smart plugs, etc. but have never been able to really find the electric drain. (We did replace our very old water heater about 2 years ago and replaced with a heat pump hybrid - that cut our electric bill by about $300 a month!)…but over the summer our bill shot up again (we were only running one AC unit at night in an upstairs bedroom).
A few weeks ago an ad for Sense popped up in my web browsing and I knew we needed to give this a shot. We are on Day Four with our Sense and I am loving the info we are getting…still don’t know where all the electricity is going, but we can see it and make changes. (Though our “trending to” for our bill is only a fraction of what our bills usually are) so I will be curious to see the trend as the month continues.
Glad to be here, I’ve already learned a bunch from reading through other community posts!
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Hi everyone, my name is Jesse. I recently purchased solar from Tesla and I guess they don’t supply the meter that tracks usage and production, so I wanted to use Sense to do it. I have some questions but I’ll post them in the main section hopefully! 
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@jessefk, I also have Tesla solar. Unless you get a PowerWall, Tesla doesn’t supply the hardware to measure the combined home usage and solar production data - just the production data. And don’t be surprised if the Sense Solar Production shoes up about 3-5% lower than the Tesla number. For me, the Tesla solar production number seems to include that power needed to operate the inverter, even though that never makes it into your house.
Thanks for the response! That’s good to know about the numbers being a little lower. I got the 8.16kw system (Of course I ordered it in July when my electric bill was the highest, and just got the system installed this month, so my solar production is pretty low haha). I’m hoping to get sense setup this weekend.
Good Evening, new sense user here. It is something I have wanted to use for quite awhile but time and finances never matched up. I’m located in Central Massachusettes in an older 1800’s home. I currently have a 6.66kWh system. I have everything hooked and have been getting good reading from the main panel. Now I’m waiting for a sufficient sunny day to set up the solar portion of the sense. Look forward to exploring and learning from this community.
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Jeff from just North of Pittsburgh. I am a new Sense user, coming from a TED5000 Energy Monitor beginning when it was first available. It started acting up (wouldn’t accept new utility rate updates) and I ran across Sense, so here I am. My home is primarily Insteon-based with a UDI ISY994i controller. I have a bit over 40 light controllers, temp sensing, smart displays,plugs,other controllers, etc. All currently interfaced with Google Home for voice commands (well, at least to the extent possible).
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Hello, Bruce here. Just installed Sense yesterday, hoping to get a handle on crazy electricity bills at our new home.
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