Sizing a Home Generator w/ Sense Export Data

How would you size up an adequate Home generator based on this data? my thoughts were to take a look at the history consumption over the most recent months in the app and see the peaks and where the bulk of the consumption is coming, if it is barely below 10,000w line then I guess a 10kw home generator would suffice for our regular needs (in the event of power loss). am I right with this assumption?

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Sense can be beneficial for knowing how big your loads are to get a rough idea of your generator needs, but you do need to calculate your needs separately. Below are only a few reasons.

  • Peak watts or aren’t always shown.
  • Your panel loads need to be balanced. Sense does not show how balanced your panel is. I wish it did.
  • You may want to use load management to reduce the size of the generator.

These are only a few items to consider and sense isn’t designed to answer these questions.

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Thank you @torchme68 for your thorough response. I guess I will have to end up going with a 20kW one to give ourselves plenty of space, now just wait for the current backlog in these that expands beyond March/April 2021.

francisco.duque… When you look at generators, make sure you look at what is called duty cycle. For instance…They will say 10kw and that is only for the first 10 minutes. 8.5 continuous. My 2 cents… Gerry

Looking at the Product Wishlist forums, it looks like this request has been (partially) made already.

I recommend commenting on it/liking the post or creating a new product wishlist post with the data you’d like to be able to see in Sense. Before we’d look at what something like this would look like in Sense, we would need an idea of how many of our users this would impact.

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Thank you for noticing and linking these two topics! Very helpful seeing that other users (albeit not many as I would have wanted) are looking to use Sense for sizing a home backup generator.

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