Sense helping with heating problems

So I had my electrical upgraded a couple of months ago and had a Sense installed at the same time. The upgrade was done so that we could put in a geothermal heat pump to replace our old oil furnace. The new heat pump has had some issues right off the bat (bad circuit board) and Sense has been invaluable in determining some of the problems.

For instance, we were on aux only heat for a week (long story) and I could see it would start out at 5kW and ramp up to 10kW after 2 minutes (which is what it is supposed to do). But a few days after the original circuit board failed and the new one was installed, I noticed my energy usage was really high and could tell by the amount used it was using my strip heat a lot at 5kW. It turned out that the HVAC installer had forgotten to remove a jumper from the circuit board and it was locking itself out thinking it was too cold to run when it wasn’t.

While they were there I had them look at the aux since I could see that when my ecobee called for aux it was only ever using 5kW. No matter how they hooked it up we couldn’t get it to run at 10kW (ecobee has a service mode allowing, for instance, second stage aux heat to be called in order to test it), and now it won’t run on aux at all. If I didn’t have the Sense monitor, I don’t think I would have ever realized there was a problem unless the heat pump failed (again) and it tried (and failed) to heat the house on aux! Furthermore since there is no light indicator or anything showing whether the heat strips are on, there was absolutely no way to tell that the heat strips were not functioning properly.

It still isn’t working right (they’re going to send a specialist over), but I think that being able to tell conclusively whether one or both strips are on will be a great tool for diagnosing this problem. And for letting me keep an eye on it in the future!

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Thanks for sharing! Sorry to hear about your heating issues and I hope they get solved soon.