We’re very excited to announce v28 of the Sense app: Home Energy Notifications
Sense will now begin more proactive monitoring of your energy usage, and notify you — via push notifications and the timeline — when potentially interesting or unusual changes occur. These notifications will help you draw important insights that may help you save money, or better understand your energy usage. Sense will now alert you when…
Overall monthly usage increases or decreases significantly from the previous month, or the same month the previous year.
A significant change occurs within your Home Comparisons.
Always On changes significantly from the previous week.
Weekly usage increases significantly from your average week.
Weekday or weekend day usage increases significantly from your average weekday or weekend day, respectively.
A new, all-time energy usage peak has been reached.
Beyond just notifications, you’ll also find these insights in the Usage view of the app (Trends > Usage). Below the Usage graph, you may now see a message if you are trending higher for the month, week, or day, or if you scroll back to previous time periods, you might see a message point out periods that had significant gaps from previous periods. In addition, starting with the September Monthly Email Report — received at the beginning of October — a new “Significant Energy Changes” section will contain a summary of all the events triggered over that month. New Sense users will receive some special notifications to alert them to interesting initial insights from Sense.
You’ll also find these features in Web App v8.5.
To enable or disable push notifications, navigate to Settings > Notifications for the events mentioned above. You will always see a timeline item for them.
A few logistical details for those who are curious:
For the threshold of “significance,” we are using 25% for monthly and Always On alerts, 50% for weekly, and 100% for weekday or weekend day. We may adjust these over time.
For the weekly usage and weekday/weekend usage “averages,” the median is used instead of average.
“Stable” for the home comparison notification is defined as consistency for at least three months.
I downloaded the updated app and enabled all the new notifications. I expect to see many changes in usage as the weather changes here in Minnesota Expect to see electricity usage go down and gas usage go up.
On the major alert front, it’s not unique to NYC but an interesting aspect of electrical monitoring is catching things like “You seem to have left your AC on cool … which is fighting against your gas boiler-fired steam radiators right now”. I have encountered that in other domains.
I’m all resistive electric (no heat pump yet) for heating so my Winter bills are fun. The one psychological upside is that I treat everything as a heater (because it is). Eventually one imagines Summer should feel the same. Surely solar-powered cooling has the magic that Allie Fox was going for in Mosquito Coast?
Ryan, I, as Emperor of BigNutzLand, approve all these improvements and am pleased to inform you that you’ve earned the rarely awarded and widely coveted, “BigNutz Virtual High Five Achievement Award” for this week.
In the spirit of putting in no effort to find this myself, could you tell me if Sense provides the community with a list of future initiatives and features being developed currently, maybe even racked and stacked in order of priority?
I’d be excited to see if any of the next level of awesome recommendations I’ve put forth have made it to the final cut, and then tell everyone over and over that they were my ideas, so they like me more…
You guys (gender non-specific) keep up the good work with making Sense better, and I’ll keep up my efforts to mock narcissistic people with insecurities here on the forums!!!
With the new update, the dark mode on the web app does not save. I generally keep the web app open in the background when I’m working at home. So its a bit annoying to have to into the menu to turn on dark mode. Thanks.
These new notifications do not work for me at all, they are absolutely nonexistent.
I’ve contacted support and got the “make sure they are toggled on” and check I have the updated version. The latter is silly, how would I have the option of notifications if I had not updated?
Last, try uninstalling and reinstalling, which I had already done before contacting support.
If they don’t know what the problem is,
Maybe someone here does?
I’m not seeing some many “notifications” per-se. The only thing that showed up on my timeline was the “new peak” messages I posted. All the rest only show up as a visual alert at the top of the Usage list as a scroll across days/weeks/months.
Are you absolutely certain that you’ve had significant enough changes to trigger them? The quickest way to verify that things are functioning is to try and turn a few high-consumption loads on and see if it triggers a peak alert. I’ve only had 2 notifications in the four or so weeks I’ve been testing this, but my usage is pretty stable.
Interesting. Mind if the team takes a look at your data?
I turned on several heaters at the same time and also used the oven for a long period last night, this didn’t produce anything. Those messages @kevin1 is getting, I’m also not seeing. As @ken2 mentioned getting them before, so was I, but mine were not even populated with text. Just blank white banners with the green money icon on left.
@andrewchong Confirmed as a bug with dark mode. We’ve submitted a fix. In the meantime, turning off dark mode should reveal the text.
@samwooly1 We can reset your peak value so you can manually trigger a peak notification. Let me know if you want me to do that.
@ken2 One possibility behind the Usage screen change is that we changed the comparisons for day/week from previous day/week to average day/week. Thus, it’s possible that you haven’t triggered the threshold of significance in the new release version.
I seem to be having the same experience as @samwooly1. We set our bread maker to run overnight last night, something we haven’t done for a while. It reached peaks of 800w hundreds of times for a few hours. Wouldn’t that trigger a notification?
That depends. We started tracking peak usage a couple weeks ago, so it would only trigger if that 800W was actually your peak usage over that period. You could try scrolling through the power meter and see if it was.
@samwooly1 I’ll ask the team and let you know when it’s reset so you can test.
Here are shots from the previous two days showing a pretty big increase. No notifications and notice I don’t have the white banner? Those banners I don’t have any whatsoever for any day.
Remember, many of these are based on average (more accurately, median) usage. The lookback period for daily/weekly (subject to change) is ~2 months. Thus, you need to think about average daily/weekly usage from the past 2 months. I’m thinking you just need to give things a bit more time. In the meantime, we’re resetting your peak usage to 400W (didn’t want to do 0, because that’d net a lot of notifications). Try exceeding that in an hour or so and let me know what happens.
@ken2 I mentioned it above, but white bar is a bug. Try turning dark mode off and see if you see text.
In the screenshot posted by @samwooly1 I see something that doesn’t appear in my app. In the bar graph there is, at the top under the word ‘DAY’, ‘Highest hour 4.4…’. Why would I not see that? Is it related to this Notification function?
Expect to see electricity usage go down and gas usage go up.
