A couple weeks ago on a Monday morning we opened the fridge and things were a little warm. The fridge was not running.
When it came down to trying to save any products I checked Sense and the last time the fridge actually ran was 24 hours prior to us noticing (we were out of the house most of the day Sunday). Based on that info we decided it was better to just get rid of everything in the fridge.
I was also able to look back and see if there was any unusual fridge activity that would have indicated an issue. All was normal.
In the end the motherboard was fried. Gave it the college try to repair, new board and evaporator fan but there is some other issue. Fridge was 10 years old…time for a new one
New fridge , Sense hasn’t detected it yet but I can tell it uses less energy vs the old fridge based Sense usage.
If you only implement one Sense alert in your house, setting one for the fridge is probably the way to go. I suspect Sense will eventually automate that type of alert.
My fridge is on a smart plug and an “If fridge is OFF for more than 90 minutes” alert captures failures … or at least that’s the theory. Your issue points to something I hadn’t thought of … a fridge can still be drawing power in compressor failure mode so “alert if OFF” doesn’t work in all cases.
When you say “all was normal” I suspect, nevertheless, the power signature must have been abnormal. Sense is definitely going to be interested in looking at your data and you should reach out to Support. If you can post some comparative signatures here there will be a number of appreciative souls in the community. Me included.
I’ve set up 2 notifications for my fridge; Off for 3hours, and On for 1h30m. Hopefully this will let me know if there’s something wrong before it becomes a bigger issue. My 26cu ft Kenmore fridge is 14yrs old, but actually seems to be pretty efficient, IMO. Sense tells me it uses 134w on average with an average runtime of 28m36s, and estimated kWh/yr of 458kWh. I looked at a similar new fridge at Home Depot and it’s estimated yearly usage was higher!