The Sense system identified and tagged my Well pump. After monitoring the Power meter, there were two things that stood out. The signature contained a spike on start, which wasn’t always the same. Like a bounce was occurring on a relay contact. The second thing that I noticed was the Well Pump was coming on way to much. It was short cycling. Like, two flushes of a toilet activated the pump to run.
Reviewed the well pump connections, etc. Replaced the $25 relay control switch and the faulty pressure gauge on the well manifold. Adjusted the Well Bladder. This fixed the short cycle and inconsistent spike displayed by the power meter.
This may have saved an expensive well pump replacement!
Sense has also clued me in when my pressure tank needs to be refilled. I can also use it to estimate my water consumption based on pump runtime.
BTW I wouldn’t rely too much on spikes in the realtime power meter to diagnose subsecond issues like a bouncing relay contact. The resolution on that display is only 500ms.
Regarding the spikes, as @pswired says, what you see in the power meter is not high resolution enough to really clue you in. For more on that see here:
Thanks for the fluke tip, I’ll definitely look at that. I do have an Oscilloscope to measure voltage spikes and get a real fine grain on a particular device. I’ll see if I can put these tools to use.
Looks like my pump rate dropped down by 70% of the run time it was previously with the fixes I installed. Saving 70% on the pump run time sounds promising!
Just to be clear - Sense has much greater “sensitivity” (really time resolution, close to 1 microsecond), but display resolution is only 1/2 second, so you are seeing RMS power for that 1/2 second interval. If Sense tried to send back full resolution data for the entire waveform, your internet bill would be through the roof (try the data volume computations).
Note that RMS - root mean square - is not the same as a average. RMS is an important concept in AC power/energy delivery, but if you have an oscilloscope you probably already understand RMS.
Sense did NOT alert me to my well pump cycling frequently. I only noticed it by hearing the control switch clicking too frequently.
The Sense data did help me confirm what was happening though. I was able to go back and look at the power meter, times/day, over the past several weeks and months. Looks like I fixed it, because it’s only coming on a few times a day now.
Sense doesn’t have a built in diagnostic alert on your well pump or any other device. I have used the notifications per device to alert me of turning on and off. This drew my attention when it was short cycling - as you noticed the switching noise. Using those notifications, I didn’t have to hear the switch cycling I could analyze the data and “on-off” times for length of the well pump cycle.
The advantage of the monitor and viewing the data, is that you can actually see a problem with a device before it becomes critical.
Try monitoring your refrigerators and profile the data per refrigerator. Then, pull them out, and really give the coils a good cleaning. Vacuum, then blow them out! Are the coils very caked up with dust? Review the data profile (run time cycle) from before and after cleaning. Do they run less and more efficient?