Missing smart plug data samples need to be treated differently for the various features Sense provides. My suggestions:
Always On-ness:
- Should only consider non-missing data samples.
"Ground truth" for aiding detection:
- Should somehow only consider sets data samples that don't include or are near missing samples.
Merged discovered devices with smart plug:
- (I'm not familiar with how Sense does this, as I only tried this for the first time yesterday, so I'm not going to suggest anything here.)
Device [smart plug] bubble:
- Missing data to result in bubble disappearing, though perhaps with a low pass temporal filter so that the bubbles don't appear/disappear rapidly.
- Don't think the bubble view should attempt to notify the user about the difference between missing smart plug data vs 0W.
Device power meter:
- (I primarily use the iOS app and not the web app, but I just noticed that the web app doesn't even provide this feature. Is this a bug in the web app?)
- Somehow clearly convey a difference between smart plug samples that are missing and which are truly 0W. (Maybe when a sample is missing, the plot should not have a red line at 0W; and to have the power value shown in the upper right as "NA" or "" when the vertical grey line is over a time where a missing sample occurred.)
Device [energy] usage:
- If % of ~1s samples that are missing, within whatever duration {hour, day, month} the energy consumption has summed up, is greater than some threshold (maybe 5%), then somehow clearly convey that some of the energy data is missing. (Perhaps use a slightly lighter shade of green.)
Device [energy usage] data export:
- Option 1: Add a new field (column) for each smart plug device that provides the % of ~1s samples that are missing, within whatever duration {hour, day, month} the energy consumption has summed up. I like this option, as it provides flexibility to offline processing of the exported data.
- Option 2: If % of ~1s samples that are missing, within whatever duration {hour, day, month} the energy consumption has summed up, is greater than some threshold (perhaps 5%), rather than report a numeric energy consumption value, report either "NA" or "".
"Other" device:
- (I'm going to ignore this for now; doesn't make sense to discuss how to handle the Other device when smart plug data is missing, before knowing how to handle the smart plug device itself when data is missing. Plus, the Other device already is weird, I think this thread is not the appropriate place to discuss the weirdness.)