Jan 30 for about 2.5 hours, Sense detected a roughly 500 watt blip for 4 seconds every 55 seconds. Any ideas? I’ve had Sense for over 2 years and have never seen that before. The only clue I can think of is two days prior having installed a TP-Link HS110 on my boiler systems, trying to consolidate the various boiler functions that Sense tries but has failed to detect (pumps, burner, circulation).
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Looks a lot like a heated blanket or mattress pad. When on low, my heated mattress pad looks like this using 90-100 watts. Probably some form of heat.
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Do you have thermostatically-controlled heat tape on pipes in your house?
I agree, it does look like a heat device of some sort. My electric mattress pad looks exactly like this when it runs all night.
No heat tapes, 500 watts would be extraordinary even so. Ditto, no heat blanket either. 4 seconds every minute, I think it’s more likely a Sense anomaly. Hasn’t reoccured to date.
I think the likelihood of that being a Sense anomaly is very low. Spurious data on the realtime power display, before any model processing, is very unlikely and I’m not aware of any bugs that would have caused that.
Was the weather much colder than usual during this time period?
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I had the same thing happening every minute for five seconds at 250 watts. Was the Keurig coffee maker. Has a 1500 and 250 elements.
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I 100% concur. SOMETHING is actually causing this, guaranteed. You just need to find out what.
This is exactly what Sense is particularly good at - helping you to better understand your electricity consumption, including phantom loads like this. As @samwooly1 discovered (detailed in his post above) he did indeed find a legitimate culprit that was consuming electricity unknowingly.
You may have to go down the road of flipping breakers or unplugging devices in your house until you see the spikes disappear next time it occurs to aid in identifying it, however.
I have better luck identifying through taking it one breaker a t a time. I turn off all breakers except those powering sense and WiFi/internet. Then, one, and only one at a time then watch the timeline.
I’ve found a few this way when turning breakers off through elimination didn’t work.
Thanks all for your input. This only happened once and I wasn’t
on site to diagnose. I’ll be watching.
Gary
Dang, I was going to suggested heat tape as well. An anomaly would be very, very unlikely as Sense is pulling data directly from your mains. There isn’t really a mechanism for anomalies like that to get injected in the power meter. Definitely keep us posted.
have you figured it out?
every so often, Sense will “Discover a New Device” that it will call Heat 3, 4, 5 etc. and it is always something that ran 60 times in one day, 2 months ago. and upon close examination of the graph of that day, I discover it to be something like this. I never know what it is and give up on it.
The only thing that is similar to it, is the ignition in my dryer. (gas dryer). But it’s not the same because the dryer has a lot more going on than in your case or the random heat devices in my case. I come to think of it as just noise in the data. But would love alternative possibilities because I don’t own heat blankets or heat tape or anything like that.
actually… that’s not a bad possibility… because I don’t drink coffee much (or pretty much ever). but I bought one of those things to try coffee.
Unfortunately, I just deleted a device a week or two ago for something like this that happened in early December, and I haven’t used the Keurig coffee maker in a year. But now I’m wondering about some of those other “Heat” devices that I deleted that maybe I just didn’t consider the coffee maker because I hadn’t used it in a long time. Next time one of these gets detected, I’ll have to make a post myself.
But I still think it is just some sort of noise. My house is really empty of possibilities. It’s not difficult for me to test everything without going to the breakers.
edit 2: here’s an idea. I have a lot of dead bulbs (some LED that don’t live long in my cans, and some CFLs) that I have yet to replace… is it possible they could for brief moments come alive and produce a usage signal like this. I read somewhere that CFLs can use as much as 50% of the power even when they are dead.
that’s crazy. Makes me uncomfortable. Why is it using power like that? The only way I could see is if it were a coffee pot brewer, and that was the heater that the coffee pot sat on or something. otherwise… that just makes me uncomfortable.
hmmm. in the beginning of January, my Always On mysteriously shot up by like 200W… I’m talking about looking at the chart itself, not the “always on” device… Something drastic changed, and I have no clue what it is…
Makes me uncomfortable too. I don’t remember who advised me to set the timer and auto-off feature on it but I have done that, the use has gone way down.
Still no idea and the pattern hasn’t repeated. We don’t have a coffee maker, nor CFLs. 500kw would be a sizeable load in our house and our other sizeable loads (clothes dryer, well pump, etc.) are already identified. Thanks to all in any case for the ideas. Glad to have this forum.
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