Introduction
Hi! I’ve been using Sense since the end of July 2018 and am loving the data I get from it. I’ve made some google sheets that allow me to track usage over time with graphs to help me identify energy hogs or help my family understand why they need to turn things off when they’re done. I’ve been using the manual data export feature to generate all of my graphs which is a little tedious, but workable for now.
Issue
There isn’t an Other category on the data export, so I’ve been making one by subtracting the Total Usage from the sum of the usage of all devices for that day. On eight days, the sum of power usage of the devices exceeds the Total Usage category. I can’t upload anything because I’m a new user, but you can grab an example from a day that did this here.
I know that the Always On category is kind of a rolling average… are these days examples of when my actual Always On is lower than the rolling average and there is no Other?
This phenomenon happens almost every time I’m logged into the web portal. For instance, right now, I have four “bubbles”: always on, other, freezer, and fridge. They’re using 448w collectively. About right.
My power meter shows I’m using approximately 448w. BUT when I go to the device page (again, web portal), it shows I have always on, other, AC, AC fan, freezer, fridge, and fridge 2 running, consuming a total 1492w. A quick check of the power meter shows ~448w. Why are these extra devices showing as on inside the device tab but NOT on the “now” tab? They can’t be on because the AC unit by itself consumes more wattage than the whole house is consuming at the moment. Is this a known issue?
What do I search for? Searching your name doesn’t work. My sum of devices seems to hardly ever equal my total usage, either looking at bubbles or the device page.
This is probably the thread that @stevehoyt is referring to:
But if the there is a discrepancy between your BOTH your devices tab AND the bubbles, VS the Total Usage number, I would suspect that something different is going on. When you see these discrepancies, is there an Other bubble or Other total in the devices sections ? If not, you could be dealing with a situation where your calculated Always On value is temporarily too big, leading to a negative Other that displays essentially as zero. In this case, your bubbles and devices will add up greater than your total usage.
Sometimes there’s an"other", sometimes not. The discrepancy can be quite high: sum of devices (shown as bubbles and on Devices tab) might be 2300, while “total usage” shows 1400W, for example. While I wasn’t checking this regularly before the heat pump was in use (it got cold out), now it seems to be wrong almost every time I check. I wonder if the heat pump parts are being counted 2x.
You should definitely write into the Support team about this. @kevin1 noted a discrepancy that can occur due to the timeline over which Always On is calculated, but that doesn’t sound like what’s happening here. Support can take a closer look.
I often have this happen and believe it stems from Always On. Where Always On is not a live reading and say it showing 500 watts, if it was reading live and the value was 200 watts then you will have a 300 watts discrepancy where it appears the total is 300 watts higher than adding everything together.