In my books, the issue is that Sense results are highly variable depending on home dependent on both devices and house noise. And users really can’t know that well ahead of of time how well things will work out. I have seen substantial progress over the past 3 years in Other reduction. I’ll admit that 3 out of my top 10 devices by usage are on smart plugs, but the remaining 7 are all native detections. And my Other is only 7% (the numbers speak for themselves)
I’ll also make a few controversial statements.
- You shouldn’t expect Sense to detect devices that are on a smart plug. If you are using smart plugs intelligently, you’re only putting them on devices (or groups of devices) that have substantial variable usage and don’t fit the Sense native detection model.
- The newest Kasa smart plugs use about 1/5 of a Watt, so I wouldn’t worry about them when it comes to vampire power. They will help you find and alleviate a lot more. And I saw the Kasa EP25 4 pack running at 22$ on Amazon a week ago. You could have bought about 60 of them for the 400$ you suggest.
- The list of integrations is fairly short but it hits some of the most popular and standard smart plugs between TP-Link, WeMo and Wiser. Hue / Philips are the only smart lighting guys that actually build power characterization into their hub APIs. Sense used to have both Ecobee and Nest thermostat integrations, until Google hosed up the Nest-o-verse. The Ecobee integration seems to be helping with HVAC detection, even though the Ecobee feedback isn’t realtime (the data is only available every 5 min).
- You might actually want to try out the Home Assistant smart home system. It’s open and has the largest ecosystem of all the home hubs. It includes and native integration with Sense, plus just about every other home automation product you might imagine.