What to trust, Sense or to HS300?

Technical Questions
1

So I just installed a new SH300 smart power strip for my aquarium and can’t seem to figure out what’s going on

Sense tells me it’s pulling 168watts while the SH300 is reading upwards of 185 watts. Which one should I trust?

2

You can trust that the HS300 will report accurate power usage (if at lower resolution) to Sense to log. Meanwhile, Sense’s native detection accuracy will depend upon the specific device and will rarely be reliable as a dedicated smartplug.

The HS300 could have 6 devices plugged into it, and all reporting (accurately, per outlet).

Unless you specifically want to compare the HS300 and Sense-native detection and keep them separately clocking the same device/s, you can tell Sense that it’s natively-detected device “is plugged in to the HS300 #X outlet”.

3

Can’t tell from your description exactly what comparison you are doing…

  • Kasa app vs Sense for the same outlet ?
  • Sense native detection vs Smartplug reading in Sense ?
4

Basically the wattage Sense is giving my for the plug is that it’s drawing 168 watts, while the kasa app for the plug itself is saying that it is actually drawing 185 watts. What I’m trying to figure out is why the discrepancy and which number is the accurate wattage.

My understanding of how Sense have wattages when you have it a smart plug was that it got the wattage numbers from the plug itself because it hasn’t identified all the devices that might be on that plug. This seemed like a great idea if I wanted to get a better understanding on the power consumption of my aquarium, which has lots of different pumps and heaters all working at different times together.

5

Thanks ! Sense does pull the data straight from the HS300 every 2 secs or so. But there are probably a couple reasons for the Sense number to differ from the Kasa number.

  • Time period - Sense displays the every 2 second sample. Not sure what period the Kasa is sampling/averaging over.
  • Multiple values - Kasa presents lots of different numbers including daily and hourly averages that shouldn’t be confused with current reading…
1 Like
6

Interesting. Thanks for the follow up info. Yes im sure when I was reading the numbers I was reading the live Wattage and not the averages it gives. However, today that seems a bit of a moot point as I have been unable to get Sense to recognize that any of the plugs are even on. It just has n/a next to all the plugs from the HS300. Sense haven’t dropped them from the device list, it just can’t tell they are on.

7

One thing that sometimes seems to reconnect the Sense monitor to HS110s and HS300s is to turn off and maybe on again NDI (Network Device Identification).

Long thread here …

8

I’d agree with @kevin1 that this is likely a discrepancy due to timing. We’re pulling wattage data directly from Kasa with no processing, so there shouldn’t be discrepancy for any other reason. Could you post a waveform of the smart plug device? I’d guess that it’s not static at 168, but has some peaks and troughs.

As for the HS300 connection issue, turning NDI on and off may solve it in the meantime. However, we have a bug fix going out soon that addresses that connection issue with HS300s. It’ll be out in the next release. I’ll make a thread about it.

9

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