What's new in v23 and Web App v5.5: Smarts Plugs and Themes

Another great reply, @kevin1. I’ve been making a few, likely flawed, assumptions.

  1. There is a large enough install base of Sense customers.
  2. There are enough data scientists and engineers at Sense.
  3. The combination of those across the amount of time the problem has been attacked would’ve created a dataset large enough to be more accurate.

I don’t say that to minimize the magic that has already been created. The number of things that can pull power in a house is daunting, no doubt - multiplied by the near-infinite variety of ways each can consume it. Just had in my mind that we’d be farther along at the recent pace of technology innovation (especially in ML). I totally get that the hardest thing in ML is data.

Have a good one.

Sean

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The integration merges existing devices. You tell it “what’s plugged in”, and if that is a device sense already knows about.

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Thanks @sean11allen.

I peg the electrical disaggregation (ED) problem as a harder one than image recognition problem for a few reasons:

  • time domain / resolution - ED has to look at patterns over a large and variable range of time. Some on and off signatures only last a few 60Hz cycles. Other on and off patterns are much larger, like the ramp of a EV charger which can sometimes take minutes. Virtually impossible to build a single RNN/LSTM that can work across that breadth.
  • tagged data set - Sense has built a substantial dataset, but it’s far from completely and accurately tagged. I suspect they instrumented a few homes nearly completely in the beginning to bootstrap their dataset (and to do their promo video :), but most customer data is likely far from complete. There’s no way for customers to completely and accurately confirm each device event that Sense detects 24/7 for weeks on end, nor is there a way for customers to append accurate tags to missed events. Sense does make the best of what humans are able to do - provide device names, select crowd-sourced type, and additional data when it does find patterns it recognizes, plus confirm one-off detection mistakes. Smartplugs should help immensely with tagging, when used with single devices.
  • composition - devices can be composed of many varying pattern generators as you can see in my furnace and washing machine traces. There are really two levels of learning here - picking up all the basics patterns, then learning how to compose them together, into a single device.
  • noise - house wiring is a noisy environment from an electrical perspective. Lots of devices all changing their current draw, at all times. Some devices like plasma TVs and computers can vary quite a bit in power usage in a very irregular way depending on what you are watching/doing with them. I think Sense’s founders had a lot of experience in digital signal processing (DSP), so they have brought their knowledge to bear on this, especially WRT what features to observe for machine learning to pull out the “signal” from the noise, but it’s a hard problem.

Machine learning has come a long way, plus there are many more people working on RNN/LSTM type problems today. But it took a lot more experts than Sense has, plus a more complete dataset, plus 8 or so years to mature image recognition to where it is today.

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@kevin1 Understood!

@mattlebaugh Thanks! Any idea what it’ll do when you tell it that the smart plug has a power strip plugged into it that has a series of signatures that currently fall into Always On? I was thinking about quantifying my “network closet” at the house (networking devices, HT laptop, several external HDDs, etc)… Do I get to cheat and call my Always On number lower than it is? ;^)

Sean

Once you classify a smartplug, be it connected to an individual device or an outlet strip with many devices connected, Sense reworks the forward-going accounting for both Other and Always On to reflect the reallocation of power. Both should shrink commensurately, though the Always On is a little tricky since it is a low-watermark calculation over 24 hours.

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There’s a lot to read here. But for everyone reading, I chose TP-Link HS110 only because if the power is lost, the Wemo smart plug does not resume it’s last status… that is, when power is restored after an outage, the Wemo stays off, TP-Link will resume it’s last status of on/off.

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@sean11allen it does subtract from your always on. Additionally it will attempt to determine an “idle” state for the plug. I think some work still needs to be done on the idle. Some devices don’t get an idle state, and you do end up with a bubble for each device in an idle state.

Personally I think the idle states should be merged with always on, where you can drill into the “always on” to see what devices use the most at idle or is still unknown. Maybe a user selectable “show idle device bubbles” option. I have quite a few plugs at this point so my bubbles look like a hot mess. It’s hard to determine what is actually “on”.

Also, that way there is no cheating :wink:

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Thank you for adding a TP Link Kasa smart plug. I have one of that version HS110 smart plug in use. Looking forward to adding their electrical switches HS200 (I have 13 installed in my house) and HS210 (9 of those switches installed) and HS105 smart plugs ( 5 of those installed.) Thanks again for starting to add TP Link / Kasa smart devices.

Glad to see this going public, I was in on the Beta as well. I now have a total of 4 HS110’s and I decided to apply them as follows:

1- My IT/TV stack. I hav ea 75" plasma TV which I didn’t ever expect to be detected, and in this same area is also all my networking and security hardware, a webserver, and various other always-on devices. Being able to separate this out into a single “Entertainment & Networking” device was awesome and took a huge chunk out of my Always On. I may further split out the TV onto a separate HS110 in the future.

2- Our refrigerator. We have a new LG fridge with a linear compressor, something that I know Sense has issues detecting because of the non-traditional nature of the compressor. Now I have reliable logging of fridge data and am also feeding back hopefully useful Ground Truth data to Sense.

3&4 - Installed today on each of our Chevy Volt EV’s on our 220V chargers. Yes, the HS110 is 240V compatible right out of the box up to reportedly 16A@240V. I did some digging and several of us discussed it at length in the Beta stage, but long story short the HS110 is “Labelled to local standards” (IE 12V/15A) but is indeed plug and play 240V/16A compatible. I have my Volt charging now and my wifes will be charging soon and it’s reporting the amp draw perfectly. Considering how our 2 EV’s constitute a very massive part of our daily draw and Sense was having trouble detecting them because of the fact we have 2 identical cars. This is awesome.

None of those have consumption logging therefore there wouldn’t really be much point in having these interface with Sense.

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oshawapblot the TP Link switches would make more sense being linked than Philips Hue light bulb. Which I’m not against the light bulbs but super micromanaging by bulb vs switches get an entire room of lights. The Philips Hue lights don’t track wattage the smart switches would at least be able to classify when w room switch went on and you could classify by room what wattage is on those switches by when they turned on and off match with Sense tracking the increased wattage when then turned on and off. So I would respectfully disagree they would be beneficial to house hold energy usage by room/switch identification in combination with sense.

@oshawapilot,
You have to share a photo of the adapter rig you used to connect the Volt chargers to the HS110s to the wall 220V ! Glad to hear it worked for you.

@iberthiaume,
You’re missing a key detail here. The Hue developers API offers customized formulas for computing Hue bulb power consumption, given each bulb model and state (on/off, dimness level). Smart switches by their lonesome can’t do that. It’s a no-brainer to compute power for all the bulbs in Hue system. And right now, capturing the full power information of a device at the socket (ground truth), concurrent with Sense’s measurements is much more valuable in two ways, than simple on/off status:

  1. You get the full power profile of the device on the smartplug/bridge so it can be included in Sense’s accounting of the household.

  2. The full power profile (ground truth) for the device is also much more effective for machine learning, for identification.

In short, I changed the plug on my 240V to standard pin setup (vs the “one pin sideways” 240V style plug) and the plugged the HS110 straight into that. The 16A/240V Duosida EVSE’s I use came with a plug adapter since they are also dual voltage, so I simply changed to the standard 120V style plug and plugged the EVSE into the HS110. Done.

The only risk with this setup is that someone could plug a 120V device into the 240V plug, but it’s well labelled and the plug is up in the rafters of my garage anyways so there’s basically 0.0% chance of that ever happening.

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I totally agree with you. The whole darn point of the Sense monitor = it is a current meter. Why the heck do we need to integrate other current meters. WEMO integration should help with device on/off detection and Sense should measure current. What a waste of my enthusiasm for this announcement.

I think that’s a great idea!

@RyanAtSense
Thanks to all at Sense for this update. I’ve obtained several TP-Link HS110s and installed them today. This is very helpful for tracking some yet-to-be-discovered devices, and I have also used these to keep track of a conglomeration of devices in a power strip in some rooms. This should help to get my Always On and Other closer to zero.

Some suggestions to make this even better:

(1) In the Sense App, there is an “On/Off” button for each of these plugs on the Devices page. I can see how this could be handy for some devices that you might like to turn on or off from the Sense app. But for SOME devices, I’d like to be able to remove this feature so that I don’t mistakenly turn off a device that is meant to be always on (e.g., a refrigerator). The availability of this button should be a setting we can change by device (under “Manage”).

(2) Why can’t we merge multiple smart plugs like we can other devices? I have seven of these installed which makes for lots of bubbles. For example, I have two set up in my master bedroom to track the entertainment center and another for the electronics in my night stand. I’d like these to appear as one merged bubble called Master Bedroom to reduce the number of bubbles.

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Small vent about me messing up last night and wasting time troubleshooting as I can’t read…
So I’m a little frustrated with the overlapping TP-LINK smart plugs. I picked some up last night and Fry’s and managed to grab the HS100 KIT vs the HS110 KIT. I /just/ about posted here asking for help when I FINNALLY figured out how I messed up (as the were not being detected by sense). Weak. Anyway I’ll return these today and have 3 of the HS110’s coming from Amazon same day (thank you for pointing out the deal frankwin.hooglander)

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This was a feature that many of us who were in the beta (myself included) expressed concern about, and I was one of the voices saying exactly what you suggested - it should be a user adjustable option to disable this, as again, exactly as you use as an example, I am using one of my HS110’s on my refrigerator, as well as another on a power bar that includes a webserver and such. Neither are devices I want to ever toggle off accidentally for obvious reasons.

It was suggested these options would be included in a future update.

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The HS110KIT is just a set of 2 HS110’s if I’m not mistaken?

These will be detected of course, but HS100’s (which do not include energy monitoring) will not.

Did you add the 110’s to the Kasa app before expecting them to be detected? They need to be setup and configured via the TP-Link app to get them on your WiFi (and firmware updates applied) before Sense will find them.

On another note, for those going back and forth about what devices they may want to purchase (TP Link HS110’s vs Wemo Insight) here’s the major benefits of the TP vs Wemo offerings:

  • TPLink is confirmed 240V compatible right out of the box for those who want to measure 240V devices up to 16A.

  • The TPLink defaults to ON (or at least it’s last power state) after a power outage. The Wemo defaults to OFF.

For me, both of the above were a deciding factor on going the TP-LIink route.

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I agree it would be useful to have switches, but only if you can tell sense what the max wattage of lights are behind it are. Which I bet is why sense picked hue to integrate with. Each bulb can be measured and bulb type is reported by the bridge.

I currently have 60 emulated hue lights all being driven off smart switches. Home assistant drives the switches, ha bridge picks up changes on the light and toggles on an emulated bulb. I had to test each bulb to make sure they lined up with hue watts.

Between the emulated hue and these plugs my “other” has been as low as 23% which I can contribute nearly all of that as my undetected EV (leaf).

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