After weeks of silence; suddenly my Sense unit put out a bunch of detection notices; all at once. I mean like 8 or 9 notices. Everything from Coffee maker to Air conditioner. It wants me to tell it what all these things are. Well that is a problem. Since examining each of these items I have discovered that not one of them shows me more than a flat line Meter display. WIthout the display of the meter I have no idea what these things might be.
I do know this. We are not running the air conditioner. Nobody has turned on the coffee maker for over an hour. It identified on item as the oven and that has not bee on for two days. THe list goes on, but you get the idea.
When I went to look at the meter for the past hour or so; it was blank. It appears as though the Sense unit was off line for a time and then suddenly at 11:55 it turn on and spit out all these detection notices.
In my view it is a serious bug that the Sense app does not show a Meter wave form for devices it claims to have detected. Yes the app is designed to do this but all I get is a flat line.
Now I have no idea what to do with all of these detections. I have no way to tell what they are and I have no clue what would happen if I ignore them or even delete them.
This behavior is very common with Sense, just have to be patient. Then some, but probably not all, of the detected devices will start to show you the data in the app that their algorithms used to detect those patterns. A few will be correct detections, most will require detective work on your part. Welcome to the “fun” of Sense.
Once again, give it time and Sense will likely backfill the Device Power Meters for those devices. They are not updated in real-time. Doing the waveform tracing for a device is a separate process from the detection. I have seen cases where a model is updated (usually for the better) and the Device Power Meter waveform changes for whole history of that detection.
I have discovered that my comment on the meter display was more a stupid user issue than an app issue. If you look at the display for the month for that device it will give you the dates of detection. The when you go to the meter you can scroll to that date to see the graph for that detection.
I have been able to sort out most of the detections. Some were duplicate detections for the same device. I think it found the water heater three times. I merged those and it is now almost dead on in detecting the water heater cycling. Some of the other things is am still sorting out. I’d did find the new coffee maker, and amazingly it found the garbage compactor.
It appears that my original issues with detection may have been related to the problems identified by the support team. Once they fixed those things it started working as described.