In the Settings / My Home / Home Details / Major Devices section there is an entry for “Aquarium / Terrarium”. Our aquarium consists of 3 electrical devices, the air pump, the filter, and the light. I would like the aquarium entry to expand to allow individual identification of these three aquarium components as part of our single aquarium setup . Thanks
I like the new Home info and details section. I would like to see you add a Shop or office as a
choice, as some of us have two Sense monitors and feed our solar through ( in my case, my shop) a separate building.
We’ve isolated that as a graphic bug in Safari and are working to fix.
In the meantime, we pushed out a fix this afternoon for cumulative totals. You’ll now see your totals again in the top right corner of the trends card.
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units are incorrect. Should be kWh, showing W
The Home Details > Device Inventory is great to see but feels partially circuitous in execution.
Agree that “MAJOR APPLIANCES” should be listed above “LESS COMMON DEVICES” as pointed out by @mikejeep47 .
The way I see the Home Details categories evolving in the UI could be that you will eventually see for each of those what proportion of your consumption goes to that category. That might appear in Trends or Now (modal).
So, maybe major categories (highly debatable; just opening up the conversation)?:
- Heating
- Cooling
- Water (aren’t there enough water-related devices to warrant this?)
- Electronics
- Vehicles (putting EVs under “Less Common Devices” seems retro; have Vehicles and then list out Make/Model?; is there a reason to then not also allow for listing of existing non-EV vehicles, just as you list non-electric Water Heaters?)
Major Devices > Major Appliances starts to feel a little “Where am I?”
Missing:
- Washer/Dryer Combo
- Water > Water Heater (solar thermal)
- Water > Water Pump (as opposed to Sump Pump)
- Electronics > Network Device e.g. firewall, switch, PoE switch. etc
For new users, I would guess: Is this the first place they are told to go to make a list? So then the Home Devices list auto-propagates to the Devices as they are detected, right?
It seems like a crucial list (and interface) because it gives Sense users EXPECTATIONS that, given the history of some posts and gripes therein, might reinforce unrealistic expectations. That being said, is there a way in the UI to convey the probability/history of detection success?
I see (blurrily) a clever UI for the Device Inventory as being an opportunity for Sense to convey the nature of the beast: “Trends” currently shows you how your overall consumption Compares with others … Sense could also show some form of “Detection Trends” for devices across the board. e.g. Getting better/Stagnant/Getting worse – like a constantly updating MRI of the Sense Global/Local Brain:
“You have below average detection in your home, let’s see what can be done to improve it”
Lastly, stemming from a conversation with @kevin1 about solar, I also wonder if “Home Devices” shouldn’t contain your Solar specifications. The more details the better. This would help with solar calibration and alerts (e.g. “likely failed inverter”) … as we were discussing. If you say your Home is at 90210 and you have X number of 315W SolarCity panels then there is an expected output … and this data becomes more meaningful when aggregated with neighbors in the same Zip.
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Nicely presented and definitely good ideas…you could be a product manager for Sense ((-
How much longer for the time of use rates? I really like to get a better cost idea based on on peak and off peak. Could it be that hard to add based on time?
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With this new feature users are now maintaining two independent device inventories. The first is the original list of discovered devices. The second is the list under My Home > Home Details > Device inventory. This second inventory includes the first inventory (copied by hand from the first inventory) augmented by devices not yet discovered.
It seems preferable to have one comprehensive inventory. This could be done by extending the original device inventory to allow users to include devices in the home that are not yet discovered, and eliminating the Home Details inventory. As devices are discovered they are marked “Discovered”. Until then, devices are marked “Pending”.
I hope this suggestion is helpful.
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Thanks all for the feedback! Some responses:
@mikejeep47 - Are you using iOS or Android? You are actually supposed to see a prompt in the Compare screen to go fill out the home details survey to see the similar homes comparison. The “hang tight” message is only supposed to appear once you’ve filled out some of the home details.
@wesman7776 - We do plan on adding additional comparisons, such as heating and cooling based ones, in the future! We started with just location and square footage for now, but there will be more.
@blackbox @ronhanson - We left that out by accident on the web app! The kWh has now been added back to the view on the latest update to the web app. Sorry about that. And thanks for the suggestions, we do agree that additional stats (and $) would be helpful.
@kevin1 @ken2 @Spagnood - The safari bugs should be fixed. Thanks!
@kevin1 - Comparison is based on total usage, not net usage (for those with solar).
@lee - Agree that a convenient make/model selection from detected devices and home details would be great. We’ll look into a nice way of doing that. As for the aquarium point… many of the devices that we have in the inventory have multiple components. Although we could add additional breakdowns for a lot of devices, we wanted to keep the device inventory simple to fill out, since the more options we ask for, the less people (on average) fill out, plus the greater risk that things might get filled out incorrectly. Maybe in the future we allow a more advanced, optional, detailed breakdown for those extra details.
@ixu - A lot of GREAT points and thoughts in there, love it! You’ve hit on a lot of things we’ve discussed here at the Sense office, including a couple very recent topics 
There are several future features that incorporate aspects of what you are saying (some are still being planned out, so not quite finalized). But you are spot on with some of the shortcomings and frustrations you mention that we want to do a better job with. I know I am not being very specific, but, please be patient and know we are working at it! @lee - your point about two separate device inventories (what user fills out and what Sense detects) related to some of what @ixu mentioned, as well as to what we are thinking through and will be addressing.
@tony.stephens - We do plan on supporting time of use rates at some point. It’s still not a significant percentage of the country (or our user-base) that has those, but we know more and more utilities are going to shift towards it.
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If you are doing comparisons I feel it is odd to make them green if there is not much electric use, but closer to red as there is more use. For those of us with Electric Cars it’s GOOD that we are using electricity to move and not gas. So, of course, we use more electricity. Same issue we are having with our electricity provider. The Tiers are designed to make you pay more for more usage, but it’s GOOD to use electricity, especially since our town’s power is 100% green. Don’t punish us for using it.
If the goal of the Home Details screen is to capture all the people that have the same device it might make sense (ha!) to keep a list of items others have configured. Before one goes to put in a device, grab the latest list from the servers. Then when one starts to type ‘Samsung’ have it drop down a menu of matches sorted by popularity so that people use the same spelling and such. If Samsung has NEVER been entered before then accept the new spelling. Same with model numbers. I assume this would help
- get better info for the ML to isolate
- let people know what makes sense (ha!) to put in the fields. Do I put iMac? Or 2015 iMac? or 2015 27" iMac? or 2015 27" iMac 3TB?
Has anyone noticed that the keyboard for the new app is in Spanish? When I am entering the Make and Model of my home inventory devices a Spanish keyboard comes up on my iPhone X. I removed Spanish as a language on the phone and it’s the same. I have quit, I have rebooted the phone, I have even deleted the app and re-installed. I got “contraseña de home.sense.com” at the login screen. Finally had to go under Keyboards in General Settings and remove the Spanish keyboard to get it to behave (but is that really it behaving?)
I didn’t see food processors in the list of Major Appliances. Swamp Coolers?
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Loving this discussion!
This is what I was getting at in my earlier comments … the UI is judged relative to your expectations.
@israndy, you are touching on what I mentioned regarding inclusion of non-EVs in the Vehicles list that I think weighs heavily (at least in philosophy) on the data presentation and the UI:
- If I had a Hummer and now I have a Volt
- If I have a Hummer & a Tesla
- If I have an old EV? (Should I upgrade?)
“Your EVx batteries are at EOL and the majority of Sense users with an EVx have upgraded to an EVy”
I don’t see how we’d have anything to do with that. I certainly haven’t seen any other similar reports. When you click the globe icon in the lower left of your keyboard, you’re not able to switch to US from there?
Got it, I somehow thought that if the keyboard was set for one language in one app it was that way for all apps. That hampered my troubleshooting. I added Spanish back and discovered that you are right, it can be set for an individual app. Must have hit it by mistake. Thx
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Yes, the number used to compare to other uses is in average watts, rather than average KWh. It might be correct, but is misleading. I would think that a comparison with other users would be better in KWh, which is average usage, not average power. It follows that the average watts number is likely to be bigger than the average kWh number, especially if you have devices with high peak power draw like an A/C or EV, and so on.
The web page display was showing W but it was really kWh. It was corrected within hours of me posting
We might be talking at cross purposes about which page we are talking about. My iOS display shows watts. I know it is not KWh, because it is a different number from my actual usage. As the average watts are shown, this is not the same as usage. If you have high wattage devices this will skew the average watts higher and not reflect the usage, which depends on how long a high wattage device is on. Its more useful to compare usage to other users, not average wattage.
I’m liking the comparison feature of the new version. Especially because I’m below average usage in my state!
BUT… Something has broken since the new version for editing devices.
- If I turn on/off notification, the Save button is grayed out. If I back out of it and come back, the setting is changed, but I don’t get the notifications.
- Editing the name of a device, the keyboard never shows up. Nothing I could do would bring up the keyboard. I had to type the name in another app, and copy/paste it into the Sense app.
Multiple attempts of this, and stop/start the app, and also reboots haven’t changed the behavior.
I’m on a Google Pixel XL running Android 9, if that makes a difference.
These are both known and a fix is being worked on. Thanks for reporting!
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I’m on Sense day 3. No detections yet, but I have certainly learned a lot about energy use of my devices and I look forward to contributing to the improvement of the device database as much as possible. I am curious to learn more about how the home details, device inventory is used to improve my detection rate. I’ve gone through and entered the make for most appliances and devices but plan to wait to add model numbers as I get detections. For many items locating the model number will take some time… So by not entering the model numbers now am I hurting my detection rate? Thanks!
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