Panamax Power Conditioner

As @ken2 & @andy touch on, an LG OLED (like I have) has a wildly variable power signature. Despite the potential to detect it’s on/off via NDI, the actual power tracking is a hard problem for Sense to solve. My previous Samsung LED-backlit TV was detected and tracked quite well by Sense natively. My newer LG OLED hasn’t been seen by Sense so it was one of the first devices I put on a smartplug.

I would venture to say that it’s close to mathematically provable that without a much higher sampling rate a device like an OLED TV, even if detected, will always be an approximation regarding usage. You could potentially track what is being watched, but that’s another story.

That said, I want to use this opportunity to point something out that isn’t immediately obvious. By way of example:

Imagine a house with an “impossible-to-track-accurately” OLED TV.
For arguments sake, imagine that the only other device in the house is a 4kW hot water tank with a very stable signature.
The 4kW usage is easily detected and is a “house maximum” per-device in our house of 2 devices.
It doesn’t take much of a leap to realize that the OLED TV can be fairly accurately detected (and tracked) by a processes of elimination, a kind of “negative” detection.
Of course the reality of detection and tracking is less ideal, but there are at least situations where “negative” detection can be applied to define device signatures more precisely.

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