We plugged in a small (20x30?) deep freeze on … either saturday or sunday afternoon. on sunday my always on started creeping up - from 53 - and by tuesday seems to have topped out about 565.
the obvious culprit is the deep freeze, but when i unplugged it, the overall energy use didn’t drop. If it’s included in the always on average, wouldn’t it still show the actual total?
I had to plug it back in because there is food in it, we’re going to empty it and test over the next few days.
my questions: even if the freezer is bad that seems incredibly high energy use and would it stay on or only cycle more often? Wouldn’t it ID it as a freezer rather than dumping it in always on? My fridge that went bad used more energy, but more obviously cycled frequently.
We haven’t had an other new appliances, what else should I look at with such a sudden, consistent high signature?
You say the Always On crept up, but when you unplugged the freezer, the “overall energy” didn’t drop… Did you mean the Always On didn’t drop or the Power Meter didn’t drop ? Always On not dropping is to be expected. But if your Power Meter didn’t change, then the freezer compressor probably wasn’t running and you probably have a different culprit for the high Always On.
In my mind, a deep freeze might run continuously for a day or so when first starting to get down to temperature, but only run intermittently once it has cooled everything down. If it runs continuously like that over the course of a couple nights to get to temp , it might override the parts of the night with the lowest power consumption for your whole house. If that’s the case, your Always On will go up because the periods of time that were seeing around 50-60W of consumption are now seeing the freezer added in. That would go away once the freezer reaches temp with its payload.
AO and fridges/freezers is often fraught because without reliable Sense tracking the AO component of the freezer is going to be unpredictable. Especially if it’s inverter-based like many new fridge/freezers.
A freezer is a prime candidate for an HS110 and that’s going to be your only (currently) reliable way to track it’s usage. In the long term I also see good reason to have a freezer on a smartplug that can alert you (via Sense) if there are issues.
And then there’s the AO philosophy regarding freezers: to me a freezer in particular is a battery of sorts and is never unplugged = (imho) it’s always-Always-On.
Fridge/freezer AO component (should) = annual usage/8,760 = X.
If it’s ON and using 0W the AO should be X.
If it’s ON and using 150W the AO should be X.
Month-to-month and at the end of a year of use you can look at the Energy Star label or mfg info and verify if it’s used more or less than spec. A handy comparison.
I’ve encountered the same with both fridges and freezers.
I was first told this wasn’t possible then Hilario said it was happening.
Mine was actually taking detected freezer and fridge and placing in Always On while they were both running.
It has to do with the way it’s calculated and not first subtracting the number. I’ve requested they charge it but don’t know if that will happen.
The post Hilario stated that is somewhere here but I can’t remember where
Settings > My Home > Sense Monitor > Signals > Mains
Take a known 100W lamp or similar and plug into the same outlet as the freezer and switch it on/off and you should see the mains usage go up/down 100W on either of the Mains legs. IF NOT then that outlet is almost certainly not on your Sense-monitored panel.
It was not the little deep freeze. That seemed obvious because it was the only new thing that’s been plugged in since forever. But as I said initially, my investigation seemed to indicate the freezer was innocent and based on the help here, I put the kil-a-watt on the freezer and kept digging.
Over the weekend of moving and such, the upstairs AC had been turned on in order to enjoy the gameroom. The AC had been turned off with the light Sunday evening, but we discovered this morning that the fan was still on, running continuously. I have the HVAC fans set on auto, to cycle while the unit on. Apparently a switch has gone out? We turned the unit on and off a few times and the fan finally cycled off.
I might not have seen that usage for months if it hasn’t been for Sense.