Smart plugs and invisible heat pump

General Tech
#1

new to the forums here. i’ve poked around and haven’t yet found this question posted so here goes…

in my house Other stilll includes one of my Mitsubishi heat pumps which is running three indoor units - one wall unit and 2 floor units. Sense already found the other zone which is a separate compressor running a single ducted unit.

by using smart plugs to cluster most of the other loads in my house into power strips eg; entertaiment, comms, office, coffee, fridge - will I be cleaning up the noise so that Sense can more easily ID my second heat pump?

TIA

#2

I’m not sure smart plugs “clean up the noise”, per se. The Sense Monitor continues to look for the transition in the raw incoming voltage, current and power data, not in some “subtracted off” data.

The smart plugs will help you reduce Other for the other remaining devices though.

1 Like
#3

To add to @kevin1 's answer, think of it this way:

The two detections (Sense vs. Smart Plug) are very different in how they work

  1. Sense by itself detects devices based on their ‘transitions’ (on/off). If a device is always on (e.g., Radon pump/extractor in basement), Sense will NOT be able to detect it.
  2. The Smart-Plugs in contrast, monitor continuously the power drawn by whatever device is connected to them. Such Smart-Plugs do not work based on ‘transitions’.

I’m not sure about the inner workings of Sense (we need a mod to confirm), but I would guess Sense takes the difference between its main CT sensors and whatever the Smart-Plugs are reporting, to calculate/estimate the ‘net’ remaining consumption (some of it goes into the ‘others’ bubble’). If such calculation is done in real time, then in principle the smart plugs could ‘reduce’ the noise as you mentioned. For such calculation to be possible, the smart-plug data needs to be sampled at the same high rate as the native ADCs on the Sense box (4 MBPS?). My suspicion is that the smart-plugs sample at a lower rate than the Sense box itself.

Can one of the mods confirm the sampling rate on the Smart Plugs? Is such information available at all?

#4

HS110 samples at something like 2100 times per second but only calculates RMS power every seconds. Sense only asks for power data from smart plugs every 2 seconds. Data from smartplugs is nowhere close to time resolution that Sense is using inside the monitor.