Other Category Grows to nearly 50% after 2 years

Technical Questions
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I’ve been using sense for 24 months and the progress in the AI seems slow. My “Other” category dropped steadily as new devices were found for the first months but now the other has grown and represents 30 percent of my total energy on a month to month and continues to grow. I was wondering what members of the sense community are seeing? One of the reasons for this increase in other energy is the way sense detects off state. I have a freezer that is located in an unheated garage and it’s energy consumption follows the outside temperature. Sense can’t see the unit due to its long run times in summer. I put a timer and established a 120 minute cycle time. Sense then found the freezer but reports the run time as 45 minutes and it keeps dropping in time. Sense sets the freezer off and keeps using shorter run times. I deleted the device in an attempt to reset but sense found the freezer and set the runtime to the old value of 45ish minutes instead of 90 minutes and continues to drop the on time. This early off also afflicts many devices as well and so the other category grows rather than shrinks.
My other category is now approaching 45% of the monthly total for this month continuing the growing trend. There are 3 devices that are contributing, and all three of those devices have been detected and now have been forgotten.

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I [@keithmclaurin] was wondering what members of the sense community are seeing?

For this month, I have

  • other: 46.3% (for this week though, I'm at 52.7%)
  • Always On: 34.5%
  • Fridges: 7%
  • smart plugs: 2%

My big items, Sense struggles with:
  • Sense has never detected my Tesla Model S charging
  • Sense has never detected my variable speed poop pump
  • Sense can sometimes detect my fixed speed aux poop pump
  • Sense can sometimes detect components (heat, motor, pump) of my dishwasher, washer, and dryer; but usually doesn't

That's OK; I still have found Sense immensely useful, and look at my overall consumption and solar generation several times a day, and have found/fixed several issues based on the info it provides, and optimized my energy consumption.
1 Like
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My other has also increased lately and my detections much less reliable. I had a couple changes that coincide with these changes. I put in a new washer and dryer set and Christmas decorations are up.
Wonder if others have the same going on. Like the electrical landscape has changed enough that it’s giving the monitor some difficulty.

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I’m starting my 3rd year with the Sense and my other has grown to 30% or stayed at 30% for about 18 months now. I’ve had problems with 240V devices coming in with half power and recognized devices becoming intermittent in detection. Two of my big energy users are an EV and electric water heater in utility room. The EV gets a charge every 2 - 3 days and for several months it was detected but now has dropped off the recognized list. I changed the start charging time to match the new time of use rates 6 months ago which may have contributed to the non detection issue. I also had to replace the utility water heater after a year due to manufacturing defect with the exact same model but it has failed to be detected in the past 9 months.

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@keithmclaurin,
I’ve had my ups downs over the past 3 years. I did a full reset in Apr 2019 and have seen better results than earlier, but things still bounce around, especially in relation to the detections and amount of energy used by my two main EVs. There have been periods of time when Sense was detecting just one, both, and neither (I have deleted a few detections along the way and had some resurface). Most recently Sense is only detecting one, the Model S, but only at about 60% of the full charge energy. There was point in Aug-Sept when Sense was over-detecting things and my Other went negative ! Now it’s hanging out around 33%, though it varies weekly.

UsageDistrib
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UsageDistribPercent
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ps: The jump in Dryer usage in Oct. is really Sense starting to see our electric floor heating kicking in. Sense can’t discern 2 of the floor loops from our dryer - all 240V resistive around the same wattage.

pss: I’ve included the scripts and data for doing these kind of plots below. The only things you need to customize to make the R script work for your data (assuming you have R/R Studio installed for free) are:

  • Make sure you have the readr and ggplot2 packages installed in R
  • Download a years worth of daily data via Sense .csv export. Download another year separately if needed (the script will concatenate years). Or just use mine (below) to try things out.
  • Place the data and SimplePlot2 script in the directory you want to work in
  • Change the paths in the read_csv commands to the directory where you put the script and export data
  • Set the time_window in the script for the time window you want the script to analyze and chart.
  • Run !

SimplePlot2.R (4.0 KB)

1-day data from Jan 01, 2019 to Jan 01, 2020.csv (829.1 KB)

1-day data from Jan 01, 2020 to Jan 01, 2021.csv (132.9 KB)

1 Like
6

Thanks for your thoughtful and informative reply complete with scripts and graphs.
I have the same S model and charge to 80% at 32 amps when my battery reaches 35%. I’ve been considering how electric appliances could report their power & energy use with a udp broadcast trigger. Hopefully there could be an internationally standard that all IOT devices would recognize. I use an OpenEVSE to connect the EV to the grid and it has amps, voltage, wattsec and watthour outputs available for the wifi transmitter. If Sense could ask then openEVSE could reply. The same is also possible with nest thermostats and rheem electric water heaters.
Again thanks for your helpful comments and analysis. It is good to know other users are observing similar behavior.

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Two things:

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