What Percentage of House Usage is Usually Detected?

[ta4]

I have had my sense installed since the beginning of December. It has only identified about 25% of my total load. About 50% is Other and 25% is Always On. I’ve been trying to get Sense support to tell me if the Sense unit will ever get better than 25% identified and no matter how many different ways I ask about this they don’t answer the question.

I asked my brother about his Sense which he has had installed for three or four years, and he too has about 50% other and 25% always on.

What are your experiences with overall device detection?

[kevin1]

Welcome @ta4 - I moved your question to its own topic. The quick and dirty answer is that the percentage of detected usage varies widely depending on four things:

• The types of devices that use most of the energy in your house
• The amount of noise in your house from various devices - noisy devices can hide others from Sense
• How much you make use of integrations (smart plugs, DCM, Hue, Ecobee historic, Wiser) to fill in the blanks.
• How much you are willing to do to itemize the devices contributing to Always On.

I’m on the lucky side - low house noise and many of my big ticket items are easily detectable. He’s a snapshot for Feb - Other is only 7.2% with Always On at 18.3%. I have one and 1/2 days missing due to a power/internet outage. There are 3 smart devices contributing to 9.7% of the top device detection (Furnace Down, Kitchen Overheads, and Switch), but the biggest loads are native detections.

And when I look down into my Always On, I have 151W of 462W accounted for - that’s without any exhaustive itemization.

[MattL]

I agree with Kevin… I think some people just have a noisy system, but most people will see a pretty high percentage of detections from Sense. It does take some time though. Last month I had 4.3% fall into “Other”. That was higher than normal though because I had to delete our heat pump hot water heater and dryer due to a weird merging and it took a bit to re-detect them. Prior to that, I was always seeing 1.x% for “Other”.

[MikeekiM]

Wow @kevin1, that’s pretty impressive… My experience is the exact opposite…

Almost nothing in my home was detected over a 6-12 month period. I had various components of my refrigerator detected as separate components (lights, defroster, compressor), I had a coffee maker detected that keeps getting triggered by my hot water kettle, air fryer and toaster oven. I had my microwave detected, and a television. Other than that, my detections have been pretty underwhelming.

I ended up just blowing a mint on a bunch of Kasa smart plugs (well, a “mint” is clearly an exaggeration, but the total cost was a lot more of an investment than I originally planned for my Sense Energy Monitoring set-up)… I think I have about 15 of these things scattered around my house now. And to be honest, I love it… The appliance isolation and the certainty of the energy tracking is well worth it… Plus, I have control over how I track energy. As an example, I really don’t care how much my monitor, notebook computer and phone use separately (more on that in a moment). I am more interested in how much my home office is consuming as a group. So I attach a smart plug to a power strip and use that to connect my home office stuff to it. Viola! I have visibility to my home office consumption!

I will use the smart plugs to isolate individual appliance energy draws like monitors and computers, but it’s usually a short term need for me to see what the draw looks like and once I understand it, I start to group things in to the groups I care about. Example: my living room home entertainment system, my wife’s computer desk, my work home office, etc… And, of course, there are a bunch of single device smart plugs that I have deployed as well.

Maybe I was too impatient and jumped to smart plugs too quickly. Maybe if I waited for a few years, I would get the better detection coverage. But I felt like I gave it 6-12 months, and the results were underwhelming. And now that I have the flexibility of intelligently grouping stuff together for a more macro view of my energy usage, I really would not go back anyway.

Let me be clear…this is NOT a knock on the Sense Energy Monitor. I am a fan. But appliance detection just didn’t work for me. Fortunately I have found a workaround that is even better than if the detection worked in my opinion…

[andrew]

@MikeekiM yep…I just pulled the trigger on 8 of them and will likely expand their use if it all works out. I’ve been a sense user for over 4 years and there are still lots of things it has problems with. Some of my items are 240v so the kasa route won’t work but it will definitely pair down most of my other unknown and other.