Hello,
I’m new to Sense, I’ve had it for just about a week now. It’s finally started to identify some of the bigger appliances around the house. One of the very first things it found is this mystery Device 1, drawing about 80w of power. I’m going crazy trying to figure out what this device might be, it seems to come on and off completely randomly. Sometimes it may run for a minute, other times a few hours. Suggested community names list a light, HVAC, fan, furnace, heat pump and TV. I have no incident lights in the house, they are all either LED or fluorescent and for it to turn off and on randomly allows me to pretty much rule out a light bulb. As far as HVAC goes, my heat pump failed last week so the breaker for the compressor/heat pump is not even on at the moment. I don’t have any attic fans and my TVs have been off when I’ve seen this device active, sometimes it’s reported on between 2-3am when everyone is asleep. I’ve tried turning off the breakers one by one but I’m realizing there is some serious latency in Sense’s ability to see when the device is turned off utilizing this method. Anyone have any other suggestions on what I can do to track this thing down? I’ve post a screen shot of the device’s signature when it turns on.
Hi @mike1627 - a few things here.
A good first place to look would be the Community Device Library to get an idea on what type of devices use between 51w-100w and see if anything looks familiar to something you have in your home that Sense hasn’t identified.
This is a big second clue - I had a mysterious “Device 1” detected in my home several months ago, using about 75W and running continuously throughout the day/evening. I narrowed it down to my baseboard heating, which is hydronic. The “Device 1” was my boiler igniter turning on to continue warming the house regularly. Devices like that are often the type of things that you’ll see remaining active through the late night/early morning hours.
For this, you’ll want to observe the real-time Power Meter to get a better idea of the waveform/behavior of the device instead of the ‘Now’ screen bubbles.
If i were to guess, maybe some sort of electric blanket or resistive heat. If you have gas water heating, it could be the electronic igniter or something along those lines, but I’m not quite sure how often those run.
Assuming this is the “signature” waveform from the device Power Meter, and not the main Power Meter for your house ? Two thoughts:
- Set an alert for Device 1 - that’s pretty much immediate and may help you associate the on or off-alert with a particular device.
- You can test whether a breaker is associated with a device, but you can’t rely on the on-bubble disappearing (breaker off might not look the same as a normal off signature) or the device-specific Power Meter changing (latency). You need to compare the manual breaker off against the realtime main Power Meter.
I took a look there and didn’t see anything that matched what i have in the house.
My home is all electric so no igniters. I have one electric blanket but it’s not turned on, unless the control electronics are malfunctioning and it’s not doing what the display is reporting, I’ll have to pay closer attention to that device or unplug it altogether.
Already have a device alert set, it unfortunately hasn’t helped narrow it down at all because it’s just so random.
I’m not sure that the breaker method will actually reveal too much. If I flip individual breakers while reviewing the realtime Power Meter I’m positive I’m going to get more than a 80w dip in power.
What is more perplexing is that it’s been about 20hrs since I made this post and the “Device 1” has yet to come back on, so I’m not sure what changed.
This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.