Is Sense good at detecting room/personal electric spaceheaters? My Sense has detected my toaster oven, the heating element within my dishwasher, and my fridge’s defrosting heating element. My guess is yes, but does anyone else have a spaceheater, and has it been detected or not? I’m wondering if I should plug my newly acquired spaceheater into a smart plug or give my Sense a shot at detecting it.
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We have two space heaters, one small in the spare bedroom/office and one medium size in the master bath. Our “all electric” home is electrically noisy, mainly from the deep well constant pressure pump, so most of the177 devices have never been found and those Sense has detected aren’t very reliable.
Sense has found the medium space heater, usually accurate, and doesn’t confuse it with other devices. Sense has never found the small heater, even though it does show up in “other” most of the time. The 16 items in the office never did get found, so those are now on a Kasa smart plug.
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Thanks! The one we bought is a 1500w unit. How does that compare with your medium and small heaters?
Based on the old space heater that I had in my old apartment that drew about the same, I’d expect it would be detected with some time.
Bath heater is 1000 watt and small one in office is 200 watt. The TP-Link smart plug registers the office heater very accurately, along with the computers, monitors, printer, etc. One possible reason the small heater did not register is that it has no thermostat cycling it, completely manual on/off.
I have a ceramic space heater; I suspect Sense will never detect it because the electricity use is constant; there’s no on/off cycle. I set it to medium heat, which pulls about a constant 900W.
You are correct…device detection is all about transitions, which you apparently don’t have. Sense’s over all power will show that draw as part of “constant”, so your metering will be correct.
@Edison517, I can’t tell the power scale from the screenshot, but is that transition that rolls off, the ceramic heater turning on. If so, it does have a transition, but from the looks of it, it’s timescale is far too long for Sene to see it as a “transition of interest”. Plus it you leave it on for days at a time, no real transition. Seems like Sense might want another category of accounting - a manually entered Always On that you can toggle on and off. Add the 900W of known Always On when you turn it on. Remove the 900W of known Always On when you turn it off.
Thank you both! We’ll be using ours only when we’re in the room (basement) so there will be plenty of on-off cycles. There are three heating modes though, so that could hinder Sense’s detection.
Ever since this firmware update, Sense has confused every single device that has a resistive heating element. It just detected my furnace ignition today. I’m WFH from my basement, Furnace just started up “Fridge defrost element” was on. Sometimes it detects my space heaters as my over ignitor. These were all reliably detected and out of the blue, they are all getting confused. If any one of them turn on, it just seems to pick one at random.
Not sure how to proceed
Please write into Support with the issues that you’ve noted post-firmware update. We’re tracking all of these issues and looking into them with our Data Science team.
Thanks! It’s Ticket #261209
I honestly have not had this issue until recently, and it’s glaringly obvious. Not sure how to correct this since there’s no way to train the model or tell Sense “hey, this device is not on right now”
- support will likely tell you to delete the devices causing issue and start again. Ery frustrating on those devices that takes months to detect.
Anybody else have success picking up space heaters with Sense alone? We Already talked about as to why it possibily couldn’t and could.
Is there a disadvantage to straight away connecting spaceheater to a Kasa? This is the first winter for my Sense. Like will it not detect on its own even if I don’t specify to Sense what it is;
- Wait 2 weeks for maybe a detection Sense finds it.
Or 2) start using the tplink without waiting 2 or more weeks while having a desire to rather not need to use Kasa for Sense space heater detection?
There’s no real disadvantage to using a Kasa device. The only issue I would point out with space heaters is to make sure that the space heater doesn’t exceed the power consumption that the Kasa plug is rated for.
We don’t want to see you burn down the house, I don’t think you need that much heat!
I have an under-desk heater that’s either on of off. Last winter Sense was good at detecting when it turned on, but kept thinking it turned off shortly after. I don’t have the signature from then as I preformed a complete reset in June. I now have it hooked to a HS300 which reports like this:
I’ve had some luck with Sense detecting an electric blanket. Sense has been excellent at detecting 3 of 5 aquarium heaters, in fact they were the first few devices detected both times.
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Still waiting on support, but my device detection is all of a sudden hideous. It worked flawlessly for almost a year. Then I got a new furnace in combination with this model update and it is mixing everything up, all the time while my furnace is running. I checked the app and literally every single bubble was incorrect, plus my usually reliably detected fridge was running in the other bubble.
It thinks my furnace ignition sequence is my power vent motor, or ice maker or incandescent fridge light. It literally gets it wrong every single time my heat comes on, which is undetected. It’s a new furnace this year and I deleted the old one
It’s so bad right now, I literally might have to lose a year of data and start over. Hopefully data science is looking at this.
My 1kw space heater did get detected and identified, but it took many months. Sense did include its power draw on day one in the total, but not identified till much laterlater.
Sense doesn’t accurately track it though, sometimes missing turn on events.
TPlink detects the heater power draw immediately, tracks it quite accurately, and connects to Sense quite reliably, but of course that adds $20 to your system cost and you have to tell Sense what the TPlink is monitoring. Occasionally Sense will detect the attached device eventually, then you decide whether to remove the TPlink and start over.
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The obvious disadvantage is co$t for additional equipment, but they do work well and when you tell Sense what the Kasa is monitoring it shows up properly in Sense reporting.
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