I had this installed right away. The breaker is pretty full so the electrician said he put it on the breaker for the attic baseboard electric heaters.
My wife and toddler were up there and right after and I noticed a lot of electricity consumption. My toddler had fiddled with the dial and left the heater on full blast. It detected it and I was able to know to shut it off.
I set an alarm for when it goes on again.
But my electric stove now triggers the ‘baseboard heater’ everytime I use it. The baseboard heater is on the third floor in the attic, the stove is ground floor (but relatively ‘underneath’ where the heater is).
I’m not sure why this happens. They are on separate breakers.
Also I keep having to delete my oven, washer, and dryer. When it detects one, it turns out to be wrong. My electric stove for instance has dual and triple ‘zones’ and many burners and those are getting detected separately and I was merging them but I believe I was merging a part of the stovetop with the oven or dryer because one of those devices would be on but the other shows as in use.
It’s nice to see my usage and it has helped me price out my 2.959kwH solar system because even with the occasional AC on I never went above 600w for the rolling 30 days (315 avg right now).
I also have mystery devices but I know if I can find the time to go down the rabbit hole in these threads I can pin point it. I will just need to spend a bit of time.
All in all the cost for this and the cost to get it installed is all well worth it for what it does. I think there could be improvements and I’m sure it would detect better if there was one in every home all providing data into the AI.
Hey there @nshreders. Sounds like what’s happening is your stovetop heating elements are being conflated with your baseboard heating. This happens for a few reasons - if you think about what Sense is seeing, it’s really just a “heating element”. A lot of heating elements look similar, especially if they have similar ramp-up signatures. A similar scenario can exist with washing machines and dishwashers (both are comprised of a motor and a heating element). My recommendation would be for you to reach out to support@sense.com with the details around these devices. Sometimes, depending on the issue, Support can deconflate overlapping devices for you.
A common “early days in the understanding of how Sense works” misconception is that devices plugged in to different outlets or different breakers, or both, should somehow be easier for Sense to detect. To a very limited extent this can be true because you could have a 240V device like a water heater on it’s own breaker … but the reason it’s perhaps easier for Sense to detect has nothing to do with the fact that it’s on a separate breaker! It’s simply because you generally have only one water heater in your house and it uses a lot of power in a relatively easily traceable way. The “ons” and “offs” are dramatic and stand out above the electrical “noise” in your house.
Conceptually it may be easier to understand if you invest Sense with some human-like intelligence. If you have two identical-ish devices in your house (let’s say you did indeed have 2 water heaters!) and all you have to go by is the Sense power meter, I would challenge you to identify which heater you are seeing operational at any given time.