Rat ate wires Cost me $9-10 per month Sense Caught it

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In the spirit of positive experiences with Sense, I thought I would post this. Around mid November I noticed a new device show up that was consuming about 50 wats per hour. Oddly enough, it also was switching off and the back on at least once or more times per second. I was puzzled. At the same time I had installed a bunch of TP-Links. It was also the time of year that my rather large (25,000+ lights) Christmas light display goes into service. It has numerous controllers, computers, etc. running it. Also a variety of Amazon devices came online. So I more or less figured I’d live with the problem until the new year.

Around mid January we were back to “normal” and I started my sleuthing. I tried disconnecting any and every thing I could think of, that might have changed, around the past mid November timeframe to no avail.

I finally gave up. Last week I happened to be doing some yard work. I have a golf cart with a mini truck bed on the back. I knew that it had a problem I needed to get to, but had ignored as it was winter. The batteries were low and it would no longer charge. Rats had eaten the wiring inside the cart.

AHA I thought the one device I had not thought to unplug in my sleuthing. I unplugged the charger and lo and behold problem solved. For whatever reason this caused the charger to go crazy in the above mentioned fashion.

At our astronomical PGE rates of 27 cents per KW and a 24 hour per day load of approx 50 watts, I figure that was costing me about $ 9-10 per month.

I never would have noticed it without my Sense.

As I side note, God knows what it did to the Sense machine learning algorithms for those 4-5 months.

I thought you all would enjoy this.

Steve

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2

At least it ate the DC wiring instead of the charger feed!

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3

You are right on that, though if he had he would have been a dead one. Just talked to my neighbors and he apparently loves wires. He chewed through the sensor wires on their car. $500 to fix it

4

https://www.amazon.com/Mouse-Blocker-Anti-Rodent-Insulated-Repair/dp/B01FUVTZKY

5

Sense is now a Gremlin detector

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We’ve heard a lot of strange and interesting stories, but we’ve never heard a “Sense detected rat-eaten wires in my modified golf cart” story.

Glad Sense was able to help!

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Ryan

Not sure it would make a good headline for marketing materials…lol

I find a lot of the value of sense for me is checking “baseline” activity. I log in already having a good feel for what the house should be doing and mainly look for anomalies.

Given the size of my house with 100+ insteon switches, all motors variable speed and a lot of things running, individual device monitoring is a challenge. I expect it to improve with time and am patiently waiting.

I would be curious, none the less, to see what your data analysis people thought of what was going on during the above time frame. Also would be interested in what they thought about the evening periods from Thanksgiving until New Years eve between the hours of 5-9 PM when the christmas lights were running their shows.

If you think they would be willing to give me any info of value, would you please send them this post along with permission to look at my data.

Thanks
Steve

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