I’m pretty happy with my Sense so far… it’s been running for about 2.5 months now and I have 12 devices found that correspond to electrical loads in my house. It actually pulled those down pretty quickly - within about 4-5 weeks of my initial install.
However, for the past 4 weeks, it’s been “stuck” learning two “unknown motors” which have had no activity according to the “devices” tab. I removed them from my devices after the most recent firmware update since they’ve had no activity, but I still see them as “learning” in the “settings” menu. Is there a way to tell Sense that it’s on the wrong track or is there something else going on?
Also, since these motors have been “detected”, nothing else in my house has been identified. I was wondering if my device detection has been stalled because of these two devices? I should have some pretty low hanging fruit remaining to be discovered, including:
Slow cooker (crock pot)
Electric oven
Washing machine (it’s found the dryer heat element but nothing about the washer)
AC air handler fan (two zones, neither has been discovered)
I don’t think those learning devices stall device detection. I’ve had mine for about 1 month now. I’ve had a possible oven with barely a black bar showing for three weeks or so now. A couple of devices were identified over those three weeks until yesterday when 6 more devices showed up. I’ve been able to identify three of those. I still have a motor, heat and light to figure out. Also had a possible dishwasher yesterday.
I suspect that a lot of what goes in to identifying and learning devices has to do with how often they are used. I also have [quote=“KHouse75, post:2, topic:645”]
a possible oven with barely a black bar showing
[/quote]
and I think it’s our electric oven but that is not used very often so it’s going to take a long time for Sense to definitively identify it. Personally I have low expectations of how quickly Sense is going to identify and learn so many of the devices in our house for that reason. Not because I have a lack of faith in the product, but because it really does take time to have enough instances for it to learn a device.
Sense just made those two motors “reappear” along with a third unknown motor last night. I still see no activity for them, so it’s hard for me to determine what they could be (since Sense has no historic data for any of them)
I have many devices I use on a daily basis, including my toaster, electric oven, AC air handler fans, and even a bounce house that aren’t identified yet. Strangely enough, on the other hand, it picked up my instant pot immediately (which we’ve used a total of 2, maybe 3 times since I’ve installed the Sense).
Everyone I show this to thinks that it’s magical. I’m aware of the blog post, and I am a big proponent of bringing two seemingly unrelated disciplines together (speech recognition and power measurement/identification? cool!) as that’s how real discoveries are made.
I just wish I could help the process along by tagging loads where it makes sense. What about the reverse - instead of relying on us to tell you what a load is, the app could ask you “hey, I noticed this spike, can you help us?” Something like a power-CAPTCHA.
Sorry that these mystery motors are a little frustrating! We are working to provide historic data for these ‘unknown’ devices in the future, so that you have a little more information to track them down.
Thanks for the suggestion and for being passionate about this awesome technology. We want you to be able to more involved in device detection, too! We’re definitely looking at additional ways that users can help out. In this vein, we recently added the ability to mark devices as ‘not on’ and to delete old/incorrect devices.
What about when a device is not on anymore? Right now, you can only tell it a device is not on while the device is running. I’d love to be able to do this from the timeline too.