I’m 3 weeks new to Sense and I’m really loving the product. I’ve been reading nearly every post I could find to catch up.
Now to my question…
I just invested in 10 of those awesome Kasa smart power strips (HS300) for my home to support my Sense power management. I noticed the really cool power meter does not reveal the labels of each of my smart plugs inline as they kick on. I noticed only the labels to the appliances that Sense detected organically is revealed within the power meter.
My question is — isn’t the smart plug labels supposed to appear in the power meter as well?
I’ve properly labeled all my devices with names and locations. I didn’t label its model for all of them. I chose icons for all of devices and answered “What’s plugged into this” and chose Other Device. I’m using iPad Pro and on latest OS.
The labels do appear nicely on the timeline.
As you can see in this photo, only those appliances labels are the “found” appliances, but my smart plug labels are no where to be found.
Do you have “Show in Timeline” on for the Smart plugs?
You’ll also see in there that if you attempt to run more that 3 fully-propagated HS300s you will likely run into some problems. At 10, you certainly will! Sense processing starts to max-out at around 20 smart plugs. Each of the plugs on an HS300 is counted as “a smart plug” so one HS300 counts as 6 plugs.
I do have “show on timeline” enabled on all my devices. These appear nicely on the “Now” timeline, but not in the Power Meter as shown in my photo. It seems, at least for me, only sense discovered devices appear within the Power Meter.
Can you point me in the direction of the post or blog article or manual where it says having 3 or more HS300 will run into problems? If not that’s fine, I’d like to understand what I’m getting myself into with this investment.
I believe there are still some vagaries, possibly processor-dependent, on how and what makes it to the timeline.
As an example, here is a “Kettle” device (Sense-native-detected) which is actually plugged into a smart plug (named “Tester” … for which I haven’t told Sense it has the actual kettle plugged into it); meanwhile the “Toaster” device is Sense-native-detected and has no smart plug.
Notice that for whatever reason the “Toaster” off is tagged but not the “Toaster” on … meanwhile both on & off were tagged for the “Kettle”.
Assume you are talking about the wattage or device labels that are tagged on the spikes in the main Power Meter. I think those are reserved for something very special - transitions that the Sense monitor considers “interesting enough” to try to categorize. As a longtime Sense user, I prefer not to clutter those by adding smart plug detections for two reasons.
The labels give a deep view on how Sense is “thinking” about detections. In other words, those labels mean some special. Let’s not dilute the meaning.
There are plenty of other places to see the data from smart plugs - they have their own device power meters, they show up in timeline/alerts (if you want), the bubbles. Plus best of all, smart plugs have special treatment with respect to they own Always On, plus Idle detection.
I see NO device labels in my power meter on IOS, iPad or Comp. Because this post is a couple years old was this function removed by a newer update? Device labels would be very helpful to me. Random + - wattages, not so much.
Turns out that those labels / numbers were developed to mirror the detections live, but were not actual markers of the real detections. As the detection mechanisms got more sophisticated the labels fell away as this visualization remained less sophisticated. The numbers still remain useful to look at your Power Meter with the same kind of eyes Sense does, when it comes to native detections.
