Hey Sense,
Any way these alerts can subtract Electric Vehicle usage? If I drive to LA and back that’s 100+ miles or 30kW. Not even half of my range, but also equivalent to a DAY of home electricity usage! 
Seeing these all the time when charging after trips makes me ignore them.
-Kris
Hey @webkris - not currently. You can toggle specific notification types off via ‘Settings’ > ‘Notifications’ > ‘Significant Energy Changes’ if they’re bothersome on your UI.
Hey Justin - I realize that - thus the “wishlist” post.
Turning the alert off isn’t making the alert better. 
Fair point 
Wasn’t sure how much of a nuisance this was for you and if turning them off would be better than seeing them as-is.
I’d be curious to see how useful this would be to the broader set of users outside of somewhat niche scenarios like this one. Typically, I’d expect users to want to see the impact that car charging has on their overall usage. If other users find this useful, they can upvote this post. Appreciate you clarifying!
My take is that it is hard to do anomaly detection (alerts for unusual usage) unless one can the known and controllable “hogs”, like EV charging out of the picture. I haven’t had any more time to work on my time-series forecasting with EV compensation, but really think I need to do it because the current alerts feel relatively random and not actionable without pulling out EV data.
@kevin1, you make a wonderful point. I agree with what you say, but just for a moment let me play the devil’s advocate.
What if some identified device goes nuts, say a well pump. If all identified devices are discounted, then the warning might never flash and the user would have really liked to know that their well was running night and day.
As such, could we have it both ways? Could it be optional for the user to decide if a given device is excluded or not? I know this makes the programming exponentially harder, so I am hesitant to suggest it. Maybe we just make the executive decision to limit exclusions to EVs, which is what the OP suggested.
Correct - If the EV is Identified, then subtract its (all over the place up and down usage) from your household energy usage alerts so they are once again helpful.
I’d wager that 25% of the folks monitoring power usage, drive (or are planning to buy) an EV. Our Sense Monitor made the EV decision clear in 6mo of use. Interesting if anyone here has those stats.
Deleted previous comment as I took the question out of context and it is irrelevant to the thread.
Or is the stat you’re asking about “how many Sense users have EV’s”? I guess it could be taken both ways.
Also this post is very similar to my concerns that I voiced here: Additional details for percentage notifications
Correct, I was looking for: How many Sense users have EVs.
Chimes in @JustinAtSense … do you know the percentage of Sense accounts have an EV detected?
The answer is probably lower than you would have thought… roughly 7% of our users have an EV.
I’m surprised it’s that high since 3% of sales of new vehicles are EVs and 20% of EV owners are returning to gas.
I would assume that your percentage of solar users is higher than EV.
@jefflayman, I’m still thinking about how we might get to more meaningful and actionable alerts. The challenge is the current Sense simple heuristics lead to many, many false positives - alerts that aren’t all that unusual given the usage patterns of a few large devices. I’m thinking that Sense could embed a few predictive models for EVs and HVAC that would adjust the thresholds for alerts based on usage or expected usage - don’t flag the huge EV charging spike, adjust usage threshold based on outside temp if HVAC is on. But that’s a very hard problem to make work generally.
Excellent response, @kevin1! Predictive models for HVAC based on outside temperature could eliminate false positives for HVAC, but as you note, such models are hard to get right. An exclusion on EV usage would be comparatively simple to implement. For EV owners, this Wishlist suggestion sounds like a good way to nibble away at the issue of false-positive alerts.
I’m a new EV owner, but personally I’d like a way to separate out my EV energy. I view it this way: power that goes into my car is not part of my home. It’s fuel for my car, just like gasoline. I’m mostly interested in my home usage.
I’d still want to know how much energy my EV is using, but when it comes to alerts about high usage, I wouldn’t want it to take my EV into account for exactly the same reasons OP stated. If one day you drive considerably more than usual, then obviously you’re going to consume a lot more energy than usual. If this happens a couple of times per week, you’ll get these notifications frequently and then they lose meaning.
Another reason I’d like to separate out my EV usage is that my solar system was sized to my needs before I got an EV. Now that I have an EV, I expect to always have a deficit when it comes to kWh produced vs consumed, but I’d still like to know if my solar system is meeting the needs of my house.
Plus, let’s say I want to compare electricity consumption of this year to last year. I want to see just the consumption of my home to get a fair comparison.
Hi there,
Thank you for reaching out!
We understand your need to separate EV charging from consumption detection in order to generate a customized power use notice. Unfortunately, this feature is not presently available for the Sense monitor; however, we will forward this ticket to the appropriate parties within the Sense Team so that this feature can be considered and possibly made accessible for our valued customers in the future.
We appreciate our customers’ feedback and apologize for the inconvenience!
Please feel free to contact us if you have any other questions or recommendations.
Regards,
Tejaswi
Sense Customer Support
I like that idea. There is probably also a need to do a little bit more elaborate forecasting than just the average for weekday vs weekend since usage is also seasonal (lighting, heating, cooling holiday decorations), and might also depend on day of week for many folks who don’t work the normal Mon-Fri.
There’s a feature we’re working on that you should see within the next month or so that should take out some of the guesswork when you hit new peaks. I’d be interested in hearing how our interpretation of that compares to what you have proposed here once it releases.
