I had a strange event the other night. I had a number of devices running at once: about 7 smartplug-connected devices and 3-4 conventionally detected devices. I then turned on my steam room, which uses about 11kW on its own. Sense saw the on event (wrote it to the timeline) but then the monitor lost the status of all of the non-smartplug loads, and my other bubble went to 18kW. I also saw a gap in the realtime usage meter at the same time. After the non-smartplug devices had an off/on cycle later in the evening, they started reappearing. Has anyone else seen something similar?
It’s not exactly the same but anytime a known detected device turns on, it always goes into “other” to begin with. Within a second, it’s shown as the known detected device. After the initial startup signature of my fridge, it then moved back to “other” again. It may run 30-49 minutes and I’ll get a tag on the timeline for “fridge” turning off.
Perhaps your steam generator is producing a ton of electrical interference that’s causing Sense to simply lose track of all other devices?
I’m not overly familiar with how those work but I’m going to guess there’s not only a massive heating element (obviously), but some fans or something to force the steam out?
So, the steam generator is just a water heater. It has a standard water heater element in a pressure vessel, and the steam that’s created by boiling water exits through a pipe to the steam room. New water is introduced with a mechanical feedwater valve. The only electrical devices are the contactor coil and the heating element. Usually it behaves just fine with Sense detection.
Strange - was this just a one-time problem or is it happening regularly now every time it turns on?
One time thing. I’ll keep an eye out for it in the future.
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I saw something potentially related again today. My HVAC turned on, Sense detected the on event, then a data dropout occurred. After the dropout, all the HVAC usage was placed in “other”. Note the lack of an off event in the timeline.
@pswired. It looks from the time stamp on “detected Heat 4” that is the same time the dropout recovered. I think it saw the HVAC wattage and classified it as Heat. What does the heat 4 power meter graph look like for that time?
@dwleckie is right. I’ve had data dropouts when Sense is either reporting or seemingly figuring out what new device to push.
There is no usage on the new Heat 4 device today. Most recent usage was a week and a half ago.
At any rate, my observation is that deployment of new device models to an account/monitor is a batched process that happens on an infrequent basis. It doesn’t coincide with the operation of a device in real-time.
However, one possibility is that installation of a new device model on the monitor requires a reboot or software reload that clears the state of running devices. That sounds like a pretty likely scenario here.
Literally just had the exact same thing happen. It’s happened in the past as well.
My heat pump was running at the time and it shows it dropping out at the same time as the new device detection, even though the main power meter showed it running after the dropout.
Not a big deal to me, just confirming the same activity.
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Thanks for the observations. Sounds like a limitation on the device model installation process based on what we’re seeing here.
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