Rough count of devices on in Other

Product Wishlist
1

Even if Other can’t know what devices are on, could it give a rough count of the number of startup spikes it’s seen minus shutoffs?
Eg. “(2-4) Others”. Or “(12-18) Others”.

Even better would be
(1-2) Other > 600w
(10-15) Other < 600w

4

One of the challenges is that changes in consumption aren’t always an “on” or “off” event. Anything with a variable speed motor is a perfect example of this. It’s one device, but if you counted every speed change as a separate event, you’d end up greatly overestimating your device count.

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5

I can see some challenges with that approach.

  • Other isn’t really a sum of a bunch of items. It’s a subtraction of power/energy of everything identified from Total Consumption at each half second in time. So treating it as a collection of devices with power spikes really gives an incorrect picture. More details on why:

  • Some of the biggest on and off signatures don’t show up as “spikes” but rather as ramps. A good example are EVs. Even though Sense is busy working to detect these, it’s not via spikes:
    How Sense Recognizes the Electric Vehicle in Your Driveway - Sense Blog

  • Spikes within a few watts of one another might be the same device, while some with the same exact wattage might be different devices, so you are unlikely to get a good sense of how many unique devices turned on and off.

  • Spikes within a time interval have no real correlation with energy used because up and down spike counts are uncorrelated. What time interval were you thinking about reporting this on ?

I’m guessing it would be possible to produce a histogram of up spikes and down spike that the Sense monitor has detected vs. peak power of spikes, but what would that actually mean ? Look at the example below - I can’t interpret the the non-identified power spikes in any meaningful way, even if I had a histogram.

IMG_E5C8E97A4A2C-1
IMG_E5C8E97A4A2C-12224×1668 829 KB

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6

I like an OLED TV as a nice example of this.

The “Other” bubble pulsing with ad breaks, outdoor scenes, hell knows (Hell scenes possibly dark so low wattage?).

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7

You point out that there needs to be one more bullet:

  • Many/most usage spikes are not related to on/off signatures. Sense seems to be pretty good at filtering out much of the electronic usage noise vs. real on/off signatures with the ones it actually labels with power in the Power Meter, but it’s probably not 100%.
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