I don’t think Sense ever started implementation of tiered billing. About a year ago they looked at all the different types of billing and decided to implement ToU (time of use), mainly because more and more utilities were moving in that direction. Admittedly, some ToU billing also uses tiers, but not most plans.
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Plus 1 on the tiered billing request. Ameren does this on my winter use, not that I necessarily hit that amount to hit it…well, there is my Christmas Light display.
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Please add tiered billing as an option, I’ve seen the comments all the way from 2017. 5 years ago now!
Georgia Power is using a tiered system as well, and my rates never look correct in the app
@robnale, I don’t want to detract from your request, but I do want point out two things that make Sense less likely to implement, plus one factor that might make them more likely to implement.
- Tiered billing is more complicated than the simple case with all fixed numbers that you have in GA. Some utilities have baseline / breakpoints that vary based on household and on the number of days in the billing period. Other mix Time of Use with Tiers
- Due to increases in renewables, utilities are slowly migrating to TOU so they can match cost with demand.
But Sense has injected their technology into Landis & Gyr electric meters. As those meters get into usage, I see Sense needing to add two things into the product
- A way to set official utility billing periods automatically in Sense.
- A way to exactly mirror utility billing in Sense. If those utilities use tiered, Sense will likely need to implement.
Watch the deployment of these Revelo meters over time:
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IF usage > tier, set new billing rate.
In principle very simple, but unfortunately you’re presenting only the simplest case. Even though metering is moving to Time of Use very quickly in California, all three of the the big utilities (PG&E, SCE, SDGE) are all coming from a legacy rate that had 3 tiers, where the baseline is the # of days in the billing period x a location-specific daily baseline.
And here’s an example of a combined Time of Use / Tiered plan that many people are being migrated to, from the plan above. Once again, it involves a baseline based on billing period x a location-specific daily baseline.
Tiered calculations also rely on the ability of Sense to accurately know exact billing cycle. At least for me, the start days and end days for billings periods move around between dates.
Under stand that you want the simple case, but to be a useful feature, tiered billing really needs to cover a broader set of rate schedules.
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It would awesome if in settings for electricity info - time of use rate zones, a option of adding a different rate above certain kwh during a billing cycle.
In my state, my power company charges as follows.
.07985 from 1 September to 31 may. (This is easy. I just use this as my default) its the same charge all day every day during this time of year. No peaks or any of that.
But 1 June to 31 August it is charged as follows.
From 0-800 kwh its .085005 but anything over 800kwh is charged at .095567. These rates aren’t accurate. Just an example.
At no time of the year are there peak hours or days.
Just summer charge and non summer charge.
But in the summer 1 June ne to 31 August our first 800 kwh are xxx rate… over 800 kwh it goes to a higher rate.
I think there would be plenty of people needing this feature beings this is our entire state charged this way.
Some option to add another rate over a certain kwh within the billing cycle. And of course that would need to be reflected on the current power draw with the 7 cents per hour at this rate area…
Hi,
In Quebec, the rate is also variable according to consumption (From Hydro-Quebec website)
6.319¢/kWh for energy consumed up to 40 kWh per day times the number of days in the consumption period (1st tier)
9.749¢/kWh for the remaining energy consumed (2nd tier)
So it would be nice to include that function. Must not be too hard to program, since you have all the cumulative data logged.
My bill is aroung 800$ CAD per month (600USD) for a family of 5.
Having the ability to enter a flat monthly fee such as a customer fee or meter fee would also be a nice addition.
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I’m sure that my cooperative isn’t the only one that prices the first 1,000 kWh differently from sequential kWh. It seems this would be fairly easy to push out on an programming update…
There’s already a Wishlist Item for this. I’ll move to that item. @brownwoodrental, please like the original request at the top.
Another vote for tiered billing. Located in Texas and our provider has 1000/2000 and 3000kWh rates. If there was a simple (automated, UDP, MQTT) method to acquire the daily kWh usage, I could do this myself.
@cuda ,
You seem to be a great DIYer. Right now the three DIY approaches to work with Sense data outside of the app are:
- Data Export in the web app - exports CSVs for a range of intervals (Day, Week, Month, Year, Billing Period) with your choice of 2 aggregate granularities (Hour, Day).
- The informal API, out on GitHub, which I believe you have already investigated ??
- Home Assistant - an open source home automation hub that has an off-the-shelf user-built Sense integration (using the informal API), that works quite well. Home Assistant samples Sense realtime data once per minute, or trend data every 5 minutes, and has several data analysis back-ends. I think there is even sample code for tiered billing on the Home Assistant forum.
Sense - Home Assistant
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Appreciate the links.
I figured it out tonight. I just needed to make time to work through what was available, been (too) busy with work projects. I’ll put something together later this month that manages all the metrics for seamless integration (MQ) with HA.
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I’m a little surprised and upset that the original request was six years ago and still to this day, we don’t have tiered billing options in the Sense app to calculate our monthly bills.
I see the last update was about 6 months ago. Can Sense provide us with an updated and maybe an expected implementation date?
Thanks
Not sure you’ll ever see that except perhaps in the form of a ToU / tier hybrid. Why ? Many large utilities are moving away from tiered pricing, in favor of ToU (time of use), demand response and more fixed fees, as more renewable energy enters the mix. For example, PG&E the utility that initially drove this request, is pretty much subsetting the E-1 rate plan, in favor of many other ToU plans.
Can’t speak on behalf of Sense developers, but if I was them, tiered billing would be pretty far down my list.
Letting you know I see this.
If you haven’t already done so, I advise you to provide feedback using the link below. It goes directly to the team that handles feedback/feature requests, and they like to hear direct user stories. Enough has changed in 6 years, so even if previous requests were brought up, it is helpful to see there is still some demand for specific requests.
Feedback here: https://help.sense.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=14481007173779
Thanks!
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What are we at, 7 years now? And not even the most basic tiered support.
Who would care about tracking the cost of the electricity anywhere close to properly in an energy monitoring app anyway. I can see why this would be such low priority that it won’t even be started within 10 years. I mean the cost of the electricity is such an irrelevant part of energy monitoring…and calculating these bills makes advanced calculus look easy. Complicated stuff.
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@markrsmith
I love it…