The first 3 months

To continue the story started above, here is the report after 1 year. In general, the trends have continued. The prediction equation given above for device detections said I would get 8 new devices, which is what happened. As before, half of those provide useful data. And I still know where 90% of my electricity goes, thanks to Sense and its integrations.


I eliminated the Devices category and added 4 new ones: Lights, Laundry, TV and Oxygen. The Oxygen category consists of a single device, which my family needs due to COVID. Although it uses a lot of electricity, we are happy to have a home oxygen concentrator since it allowed my mother-in-law to leave the hospital. She was there for two months, and was quite weak upon her release. She is much better now, but still uses oxygen at night.

Week 44 is noted NO DATA. The server at Sense had a “monitor data pipeline performance issue” during the last week of October, with multiple customers affected. Although Sense reported partial data to me that week, some of that was incorrect upon examination. Therefore, I discarded even the partial data and left the whole week blank.

The TV category has three devices, all integrations. At week 46, I got around to putting the living room TV on an HS110. I was surprised by how much energy usage it recorded, as I did not expect it to be so inefficient. At week 18 of 2021, I replaced it with a new model which has the same diagonal measurement, and saw energy usage for that device drop about 75%! Based on 24 weeks of TV usage data, I estimated energy usage from the old TV during the period prior to connecting the HS110. Those estimates are included in the above chart as if they were measured values. The chart below does distinguish between measured and estimated values.

The HVAC category accounts for 33% of total usage during this first year. During the summer (weeks 27 through 38), it accounted for over 50% of usage! Since the 3 month summary above was written near the end of summer, keeping Other to 10% of total usage was easier. As winter came on (I have gas heat), I realized there were things still to learn. I purchased 3 of the new KP115s to help track that down. I now have a total of 18 TP-Link devices, which is almost at the limit of 20 supported smart plugs. I also embarked upon an experiment to measure lighting using Phillips smart LED bulbs. You may read details of that experiment at Hue indicator bulb. That experiment was successful in identifying much of the remaining Other usage.


The above picture illustrates how important integrations are in reducing Other. They have measured just as much energy as has Sense itself! Without Sense, of course, none of that energy usage information from Phillips and TP-Link would have been recorded, so I am still very happy with Sense. @NoHoGuy reported in his 1 year Observations that Sense alone was able to get Other down to to 30%, which is different than my experience. The final key for reducing Other in my case is manual estimates. They are based on past measurements as described for the TV, or based on a traveling smart plug as frequently suggested by @kevin1.

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