the ones that sit inside and use hoses are referred to as Portable Air Conditioners. Those are the ones I was looking into, but Consumer Reports says they don’t work that great at all.
I might need to explore further. I have a window near where I work in the garage. The wife wouldn’t like the way it sticks out like a wart is my problem. You’d be able to see it sticking out on the side from the front of the house
a window unit you would see. But I don’t believe you would see a portable AC unit. it is just a hose to a sealed window. The problem with that they supposedly aren’t nearly as good as window units. And it sort of makes sense when you consider that in order to cool, they have to suck in air from the outside and then blow that air back out. all the while dumping heat into your room simply by being in the room.
The ones I was looking at for portable did not have the outdoor hose. So I’m thinking it would be cooling air that was already cooler than outside. They did have to be dumped or have a drain like a dehumidifier.
That is all a dehumidifier is anyway, a portable A\C
Depends on the dehumidifier.
a dehumidifier can be basically an A/C, the one I have is. But dehumidifiers actually heat up a room rather than cool it down (however like a fan, they can make a room “feel” cooler, they don’t actually cool the room). in order for an AC to cool down a room, it has to either be outside (such as a window unit), or inside with a hose to the outside.
Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. In order to cool the air down in your house without destroying heat energy, the unit has to collect that energy and dump it outside. if it is just collecting it and dumping it back into the room, then your room will remain the same temperature and then get even hotter because the unit is creating heat itself.
Either you are looking at a dehumidifier, a portable unit (and missed the hose), a window unit that sticks out the window like wart, or something else. regardless of what it is, if it is an air conditioner, some part of it must be connected to the outside.
There are little As Seen on Tv “air conditioners” that you poor cold water into and they blow air across the cool water. possibly even injecting the water into the air like a fine mist. but that is really stretching the definition of air conditioner to include anything that… conditions the air. By that definition, an air purifier and a humidifier are also air conditioners.
Can’t imagine that…the heat has to go somewhere, ether by having the whole unit outside (window) or by blowing it out thru a hose (portable a/c).
Portable dehumidifiers measurably warm up the room they are in. 100% of the heat they generate simply by running says in the room and no room heat goes outside. Only moisture gets removed and into the tank. That does make the room feel better, but it will be warmer.
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The dehumidifier only heats the room because the compressor is putting off more heat than the evaporator coil can effectively absorb to transfer to the condensing coil which deposits the moisture into the drain tube or pan.
They are all miniature a/c units, all the ones I’ve seen. They just aren’t large enough to first remove moisture and then remove heat ( a/c doesn’t cool air, they transfer heat).
I see the a/c option, no matter the choice will ha e a connection to the outdoors. I like the idea of just a drain tube. If I decide to get one this year, I’ll let you know how it works.
You are just repeating what I said…
yes, as I said, the dehumidifier heats the room because the laws of thermodynamics say that it can’t just destroy heat energy. it can only store it, or move it to another location. the refrigerant cannot store infinite amounts of heat energy. and it can’t stop that heat energy from leaking back into the room. so it doesn’t even work as a temporary air conditioner.
However, the dehumidifier is large enough to remove moisture and heat. It has to be, the way this type of dehumidifier functions is by dropping the temperature of the air below its dew point. And if you were to set it up so that it blows on you, mine does blow cold air. The issue is that while it is blowing cold air out of one end, it radiating/convecting hot air from the other end. the condenser is taking the heat out of the air the dehumidifier sucks in, and the evaporator coil dumps it into the room as the processed air is dried out.
So it transfers the heat from the air it takes in, and by virtue of running it adds its own heat, to the room while blowing out cool dry air. If it were to be connected to a separate environment, it could transfer the heat there instead.
anyways, I lost my mind. My AC didn’t turn on at 2 AM randomly. the way Sense displayed the graph, it took me a day and a half to realize that I was looking at 2 PM when I got home from work and the AC kicked on, not 2 AM… I don’t think I’m getting enough sleep lately lol.
I’ve cooled my house down to 73 because I was doing some preventative maintenance on my AC and wanted to make sure all was in order. After I take a shower, I’ll find out if I sleep better at 73 degrees than I do at 78-82.
Well, good luck tonight @Grandpa2390
Hopefully you sleep great either way it’s set so you do t have to absorb the cost of running it 10 degrees lower than your normal.
I might be a tad you he than you judging by your screen name with “grandpa” in it. I’m just 45 but getting 2 am mix up with 2 pm is really easy fro me, happens to the best of us.
Anyway, hope your testing tonight comes out really well and your nights sleep even better.
Always a pleasure talking to you. And I’m sure I’m not alone in appreciating you wisdom and insight.
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I blame Sense. I am not going senile 
you, myself, an engineering friend of mine who works with AI software development or something like that… anyone else on this forum who might have been reading along… nobody pointed out that I was looking at 2 PM not 2 AM. Nobody said, grandpa you’re senile, that 2 PM 
lol. the time is right there in the screenshots. We all missed it. I know this is a logical fallacy, but I’m going to say it anyway. We can’t all be crazy. The Sense meter is just displayed in a way that lends itself to being misread. or something.
ugh. It took an hour to bring the temp down to 74 from 78. and then another hour for it to rise back to 78. it’s 82 degrees outside (typical around this time). That’s the other reason 82 is a good temperature at night. Without the sun. my house won’t really get hotter than the outside ambient temperature of 82. So there isn’t much need for AC at night at that temp.
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The BS that you don’t know your own loads in your house is ridiculous.
You bought the hardware but Sense refuses to allow you to enter your own data.
Anybody else out there wants to sue Sense let me know!
Do you have an iPhone, Android or windows device?
Can you make changes to every single aspect?
With all of our DATA tied together and feeding off of one another, there is good reason not to allow it.
What if you incorrectly identify something and you name a device that doesn’t match the watts or detection you’ve tagged it to?
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I don’t know what you mean or what you are expecting to happen when you say “allow you to enter your own data.”
- I know that once Sense has detected a device, I can rename it, change the type of device it is, plus add additional data based on what I know about my house.
- I also know that similar type technologies, like facial recognition will let you label faces once the photo program detects the region as a face. Do that for one or two faces of “Uncle John” and the program will find many other faces, mostly of “Uncle John”
- In the same kind of program, you can draw a box around a face and label it “Uncle John” … But that’s not going to help one iota in teaching the program how to find the dozens of other photos of “Uncle John”
So yes, you probably could label lots of waveforms as stemming from a particular device since you know your house so well, but unless you do it in a way that machine learning can digest it, you’re going to be labeling manually til the end of time.
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I pretty much am giving up, though I did decide to keep the device in hopes they improve and since it does give me ability to see whole house usage data without going out to read the meter. Using the HS110 connected to my refrig I can see that my refrigerator has used 3.81 kWh in the last 16 hours since midnight. Sense says I have used 1.8 kWh. So it is only seeing 47% of usage.
I know that Sense also gets only part of my A/C.
With the HS110s I can see all the 120 volt devices I care about, and therefore don’t need Sense. I have the A/C, a pool pump, and a dryer on 240v. The pool pump doesn’t matter because it is fixed speed drawing 1745 Watts for the 8 hours it runs each day. The dryer doesn’t matter because we run full loads and it uses whatever it uses. That just leaves the A/C, which I would like to see how much power is used based on outside temps and our thermostat settings. SO, I thinking of moving the Sense probes to monitor ONLY the A/C for awhile!!! It will still get the 120 volt data from the HS110s, loosing only the total house usage data for a few weeks.
Sense is probably spot on about your refrigerator. Likely, it’s detecting only the compressor while the HS110 is seeing the compressor, solenoids, interior fan, ice maker, door dispenser, defrost and lighting.
When Sense was doing its best on mine it had separate detections for the compressor, door lights, defrost and the water/ice door dispenser.
So HS110= Total cost of appliance
Sense right now with one detection= the cost of cooling (removing heat) alone.
The only time Sense would pick up wrong like your thinking is when it’s a 240 device and it sees just one leg, it would be half.
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You get three bonus things with Sense that you would’t with the Kasa app on its own. I think Sense is immensely valuable on top of the basic smartplugs for:
- The whole house usage for comparison
- The full history of every device on the smartplugs
- The integrated UI that also brings in Always On (for the House and each individual Smartplug)
I find the Kasa UI to be a joke for power reporting.
ps: Hope you let your fridge Smartplug device know that it corresponds to the refrigerator detection to avoid double counting and also to help teach Sense about what it is missing.
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I concur with @kevin1 and feel Sense provides an information when used with Sense that the smart plug and KASA do not on their own.
While I prefer the Sense native detections, the smart plug integration is great. And I was a huge critic of ha I g to supplement the purchase of Sense with additional purchases of smart
Plugs.
Nope. Sense actually gets the 3 minutes the ice maker heater is on before dumping tray of ice. It even gets the 5 seconds that a tray of ice is being dumped. It gets everytime we open the door and the light turns on. Solenoids use about 0.000001 KWh per day. My refrig runs about 80% of the time. But Sense shows it as having not run most of this afternoon and evening. BTW it is 10 PM and while it has run a few hours, sense shows no running.
I accidentally set my A/C to 72 instead of 82 a few weeks ago and Sense showed my A/C running from about midnight to until about 3 AM, then not running until around 7 AM, then went back to showing it running again. I have notice it on several times and sense put it in Other category
Sense just doesn’t have a lot of common sense…lol
Hate to hear that @billsspammail
My experience is much different and I wish they would make it more clear just how different the experience can be from user to user.
Being consistent is definitely a measure of success in my humble opinion.
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