@herbertk1, I used an App to measure the WIFI strength near the Panel. I happen to have an AP that also gives me a reverse look at the connections it sees and the strength it sees the device at.
I have no information about your noisy house or panel question though.
All I have seen says that you should start to see devices in 24-48 hours.
Henry
hello… I’m David… living in central CA, my wife and I live in our first home… just put up a new SunPower 6.12kW system just a month ago… got Sense and installed it today, so its learning what it needs to right now… but already we’ve been educated… our fake xmas tree with old incandescent bulbs is causing the wattage in the home to change by 200+ watts when they come on… WOW, I guess that tree my parents gave us last year is getting too old… we’ll be getting rid of that this year… get some nice LEDs like the 9 watt 150 bulb strings on the house… looking forward to the education we get from this device…
anyway, on another note, I’m a Residential Energy Consultant here in CA and I advise builders & homeowners on Title 24, the CA Energy Code… I’m a former Marine, semper fi to any devil dogs out there… father of 2 boys, a daughter, and a stepson… and we all take energy and saving money seriously…
yes, I had never thought about it… after doing some testing, multi-on/off with/without tree topper, the topper (newer LED type) is <10W, but that tree with builtin lights and electrical was about 220-240W… crazy… I usually run the tree late in day, about 4-5hrs, for the month of dec… so running some quick numbers and comparing to last year’s bill, the tree accounted for 10% of our 2017 dec bill… 37-38kWh over the month… wow… an real eye-opener… I still can’t believe it…
but hey, that’s why sense is there… to teach me where I’m wasting energy, money, and time…
Mine averages 402W. Good thing it’s only on 5 hours a day. But still is projected to about 8% of my usage for the month of December. Looking at the actual cost though, it’ll be < $6 for the month of December, so spending $200-300 to replace it w/ a tree with LEDs would still be bad economics as I can run the tree for 34 years before spending $200 on electricity (at the current cost of course, so probably w/ rising costs would be about 20 years to “break even”) so I don’t really see a real need of replacing something that just runs for a month each year just because of the electricity cost for that month.
I do appreciate your view, but for me, its not about the “bad economics”…
for me, I have a 2016 built home that has a certain level of energy efficiency… I have a newly installed 6.12kW SunPower PV System, and the whole purpose to my purchase of a Sense Monitor was to make sure that my PV system will always cover 100% of my needs… I took 14mo of past bills, estimated my next 12mo of bills (with an increase in use), and sized my PV system at 85% output… that landed me in the neighborhood of about 10MWh of my estimated needs for the next year… my PV system is guaranteed no more than 1-2% loss year over year… so if I want continued coverage by my PV system, then I must continue to find and replace gross wastes of energy in my home… I’m merely stating that in the 1st 24hrs of operation, my Sense Monitor did its job and let me find my first needed upgrade to keep me on my path/goals…
for me, getting solar was about keeping my home within the limited income I have, and making sure I spend as little as possible on utilities… its about sustainability… I live in one of the poorest counties in one of the most expensive states in the country… I have no desire to move, I’m a disabled veteran, late 40s, with a moderate income (family of 6, <100k/yr combined), and I’m in the 2nd year of home ownership… never had a home before… and I refuse to loose this home to means that I do have control over… for my goals, the tree will be replaced…
on a lighter note, any tree is not likely to last 10-20yrs, so your “bad economics” is even worse… I’ve had the tree 2yrs, my parents 5-6yrs earlier, so its lived its usefulness…
A note - pick up the tree after Christmas sales - - they are reduced by as much as 90%.
lol, yes, my wife already has the handle on that one… thanks very much… we even have a local kmart and sears being closed down… so options should be good for savings…
Hello! I live in the Washington DC metro area working out of my house for a large IT company as a Sales Engineer. I started my career as an EE and love to build and dig into and repair all sorts of things. I do almost all of my own car maint, fix/build my own computer systems (and those of the family, yeah I’m that guy) and do my own investing (don’t trust those guys on WS), my own home remods and reapirs, etc. I purchased Sense to better understand my energy usage and have already come to realize my ‘always on’ is 2x that of national avg. I expected nothing less as I have two servers, lots of laptops, PCs, and 6 monitors that are generally always on. Will be interesting to grab some of the TP Links and monitor some of those devices. I am also interested in Sense for my lake house so I can monitor usage there as I rent it out for vacations, etc. Keep up the good works guys. Oh - BTW, I saw this device on This Old House, one of my favorite shows ever.
@mx4cc904 howdy from the opposite coast… glad to meet another of my kind… nerdy with a touch of mechanic… anyway, I’m not sure what you are using your server for, but my server is:
AMD APU A6-6400K on a m-ITX board
16GB RAM
250GB SSD system drive
8TB WD Red drive (files & DVR recordings)
1TB SSD (security camera recordings) drive
this system is only using about 50-80W, always on, running OpenMediaVault & Plex
my DVR tuner, HDHomeRun Prime only uses 5W, xfinity/comcast cablecard, always on
this setup runs really good… the HD Prime has 3 tuners, so I’ve been able to record 3 movies (my cable company broadcasts 720p), play 3 movies (streaming on local network to Rokus on each TV), and be recording my (2) FullHD 1080p security cameras all at the same time without issue on that single server…
my security/router is an Intel J1900 SBC with 4GB RAM & 16GB SSD, with (5) built in NICs, 10-15W, always on, running pfSense… with VPN to the office…
hope that gives you some ideas… my “always on” runs around 270-310W…
Nice setup. I have one server running HyperV hosting my AD/DNS and DHCP services, etc. Also doing WSUS on that server. I need to upgrade it from Server 2008. My other server is a converted Dell Workstation Precision T7500 with a single Xeon X650 proc with 24GB RAM, and 3 drives, two are 1TB drives and one is a 2TB drive. That server hosts my vSphere env for various mgmt tools I sell and hosting Citrix and VMware VDI images, etc. My most recent acquisition however is a Synology DS1800+ with 2 6TB WD Red drives and one 10 TB Seagate Wolf Drive. That is a very expensive but beautiful piece of equip. I also maxed out the SSD Flash and RAM on the Synology drive. I need to upgrade my router and security for sure. Curious, what app do you use to record movies? I use PlayOn for recording and Plex for playback as it supports DLNA much better but I am only using the free version of Plex right now.
I use the paid version of Plex… OpenMediaVault has Plex Server available in its repositories, but they have a windows-based server also… HDHomeRun Prime has a “paid” version of their software, but if you run Plex Server (paid) it supports the HDHomeRun devices as network-DVRs… so its seamless, Plex for record and playback… very efficient…
my security cams are FosCam Cameras, and OpenMediaVault supports FTP, so the cams save direct to the server over FTP… FosCam cameras save video in fullHD 1080p, no huge files… every 10mins creates a new 260MB file… time/date codes in file name… so easy to find any time frame you want… since I have a dedicated 1TB SSD for camera storage, I get 10 days of recordings, then a cron job deletes the 11th day recordings…
my Dad and I run a home-based business from his house, the other end of my VPN… his server is another AMD APU, 32GB RAM, 30TB of WD Red Drives, some data, some hot-swap backup… runs windows server 2016 and Plex server there as well… the two Plex servers are on the same account and we share videos and such… works very well…
intel processors are just energy hogs… we’ve been switching all our systems to AMD… a lot less wattage… my business CAD machine is a Ryzen 2700X octo-core with all the bells & whistles, driving (4) 1080 displays on a Radeon Pro 9100 video… my system idles at 200W and even hard tasks are nothing more than 300W… my Dads machine is a Ryzen Threadripper and those are just awesome…
