Super High Usage

I could see, @Wordenseth, a more “absolute” Sense notification in your situation … assuming you actually did have “Super High Usage”: This is beyond what the Goals feature allows.

“Sense here, we see you are using an exceptional amount of power at the moment. Everything OK?”.

The sneaky aspect to consumption is that “Always On” and frequently-used devices ultimately tend to use a lot more than you might think. Of course a water heater is a BIG user but the electrical consumption mostly correlates with how much water you use. To state the obvious: reducing hot water consumption reduces electrical usage.

The “reduction” choices for always-on devices can be more complicated. When should you buy a new fridge because your existing one is so power hungry? The ultimate use-case for Sense, imho, is that with it you will get notifications like “Hey, we’ve noticed your fridge is close to the end of it’s life, we would suggest getting a new, more efficient one”.

When you combine that with potential Sense-awareness of a household solar input you can see the calculus could be quite tricky. Does a net solar-powered house that doesn’t feed significant excess to the grid need a new fridge? Well, for sure, if you intend getting an EV.

Here are a few Sense finds in my case:

  • My always-on network PoE switch (for wifi access points; small LED lights; cameras and so on) uses about the same as my electric washer/dryer annually! Clean or connected?

  • A desktop computer in standby/sleep uses more energy than I would have expected … they should be shutdown when possible.

  • My kettle + toaster uses more than half what my (efficient) fridge uses. These are the things you see staring at the Device stats, sorry. Surprising. Slight reduction to the water volume (to boil) leads to significant reduction. Toast will not be compromised however!

  • Over-using a vacuum cleaner mid-summer is something to be avoided: the heat output is a significant extra load for the air conditioning. In my case, with electric resistive heating, I actually feel the “efficiency” of Winter vacuuming because it warms my space! The same goes for everything else in Winter: “free” heat!

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