[Project] Fault Detection: Power Quality

I’m getting 1000s of spikes/dips per day. I wired in 4 home run circuits for all 4 window AC units in my house, and another dedicated circuit for my home office equipment, but I’m still seeing voltage spikes and dips. I have solar panels, if that makes any difference.

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Interesting @dduarte527 ! Why don’t you start your own Topic under Sense Labs:

Title it “Power Quality - Thousands of Dips” or something like that. Add screenshots as noted…

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+1 for @kevin1 response here, @dduarte527.

Create a new post by navigating to Sense Labs and pressing the “New Post” button in the top right-hand corner. Just fill out the information in the template and more of the Community will be able to add their input. Reach out to me via PM if you have any issues while doing so!

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I second the motion for alerting of dips/spikes - lots of feedback here, so hopefully some functions are added for that. For my part, I just noticed and am reviewing this information for my home.

That said - I expect most of mine will match up with AC Compressor start and stops. I can manually watch my voltmeter move when they do, and LED lights are impacted for me. From a feature improvement view, I think correlating large loads starting/stopping, with spikes and dips would be ideal - and something the ML/AI shoudl be able to learn.

That said - I would prefer the option to download a CSV with all of the collected volt data for a period (even if it is aggregated to say, every minute, 5 minutes, or something configurable). I downloaded the CSV of my spikes, and while it is useful, I would be more useful if i could see the measurements over time - not just during the event.

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Power Quality - Frequent Dips from Utility

Just wondering…at what point do the old events past 30 days drop off? This screenshot was taken on 9/20. I’m at about 52 days for my oldest, but still tracked event.

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Today sense detected a power quality issue I didn’t notice any different I was just looking around the app

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Found out I had power quality issues by looking at the lab. I wasn’t aware we had a problem otherwise. We do that solar and it is split into two sets. Could that be causing any of the issues?

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If your SENSE readings are correct, then you may have a loose or bad connection at the breaker panel. You will probably need an electrician to come inspect and see if all your terminations are tight.
Or maybe the SENSE monitor has a bad chip that reads your voltage on L2.

Something you might try, is to check your house external ground connection. You can read my blog below and see that I improved my power quality by cleaning the contacts and using a new grounding clamp. Turn off all your power before you attempt this. I cleaned my ground rod connection using a battery-powered drill with a wire brush attachment. This may or may not help you. Maybe other users will reply with their ideas.

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This has probably been one of the most helpful features from Sense.
We’ve lived in our home for over 5 years. We’ve noticed that large appliance turning on caused some light flickering but thought nothing of it. Over the last 6 months, we noticed that our solar panels would shut down whenever we turned on the oven and microwave at the same time, almost as if the power was temporarily shut down. The solar company could not figure it out.
Then Sense turned this feature on and reported that I was getting over 680 voltage dips. Called the power company they they detected that the ground line from the drop line was faulty. They fixed it and all the faults are gone.

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Power Quality - Failing Phase

Hi,

Any chance you could make the Volt dips and spikes monitoring for 240V. Yes, I know that Australia isn’t “supported”… but would be an easy tweak for us on 240V (I cant actually see my data as it’s all up I. The clouds of the graph

Would it be possible to also provide “power quality” data for the flex sensor add-ons as well?

I have an appliance (Miele TWI180) that intermittently shuts down due to detected electrical faults. After some months of back & forth Miele has replaced the DC motor for the drum however they believe that issue is with power quality of circuit (I know thanks to Sense Labs that I have no power quality issues with the mains). So recently I purchased the flex add-ons with plan to monitor just the circuit serving the dryer.

I registered a voltage spike of 146.7 volts, but there is no indication on my graph.

When will SENSE add the feature that immediately notifies the user when a voltage spike or dip has occurred?

I also would like to see a graph that you can scroll back through time. I agree with all the comments made by @Edison517 on the Jul 24th post. Copying @EmoryAtSense2.

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This is definitely odd that the graph is not showing the spike here @Dcdyer - can I give Data Science permission to look at your data and see if we can figure out what happened here?

I won’t completely answer this for @EmoryAtSense2, but these requests and feedback are on our radar. We’re aware of how helpful Power Quality has been for folks and we are looking to improve that at some point.

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@JustinAtSense You have permission to review my data.

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To: @JustinAtSense @EmoryAtSense2

Is there any news on why a ‘voltage surge’ on my earlier post did not show on the graph?

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Sorry, was waiting on a response from a few folks that were out of office the week this came in and just coming around now. I’ll have a more definitive answer for you tomorrow on why this voltage spike wasn’t showing in your graph.

Thanks for pinging this @Dcdyer
We found the spike in the data and initial suspicions were that because the spike was so brief, the graph smoothed it over. Originally we thought this was a Data Science issue, but after investigation we found it’s due to how the JSON-generated graph handles brief outliers in the data regarding to “smoothing”.

One of our developers will be looking at how we can better handle these “brief outliers” and handle them uniquely for these cases. Moving forward, your reported “Spikes & Dips” are reliable sources and will include these “brief” spikes.

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Hi every one what steps should I follow to identify what is causing such a bad energy quality in my home