Sense saved me an HVAC bill!

I’ll try to make this short.

My heat pump wattage use looked odd starting last night. I chalked it up to the heat running instead of the AC, but today my AC started up and the watt graph looked wrong, and the unit sounded wrong (my office is right next to the outdoor unit). Turns out the outdoor fan wasn’t running (it was trying but failing).

Turns out I had 2 issues; one was a bad capacitor (I think), the other was a wire that was pinched and shorting to the frame, and had nearly broken completely!

Repaired the wire with a splice, replaced the individual capacitors with a dual capacitor (the previous owner must have replaced the fan cap only(?)), and now everything is back running again!

@JustinAtSense, feel free to use my data (for science!) to see why I may not have received any notifications from the app, and know what a bad cap/short looks like; maybe not enough failures to warrant an alert, and that’s ok. I’m just glad I was able to save money by having a new capacitor on hand already, and not calling an HVAC guy for $80!

2 Likes

Hey @Edison517! Did you enable Sense Labs yet? We’d love you to share what you see there in the Sense Labs section of the community - just use this post as a template!

Yes, Labs is enabled. The number of odd spikes wasn’t very many since I caught the issue pretty early.

I ended up testing the capacitors with a multermeter; they both read within spec, so I think the issue was ultimately a shorted wire. But new caps certainly won’t hurt lol.

I’ll look at posting to the Labs!

1 Like