Where is SENSE in the ability to TRAIN for Device Detection?

Identifying Devices in Your Home
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Hello, new SENSE user here, after a bumpy start and some BACKEND TECHNICAL WORK, i’ve been UP and RUNNING with Solar and Grid Monitoring, and SOME Detection, Thank you!

I’m in I.T. and although it’s NOT directly related to what SENSE and ELECTRICITY is doing, I assume there’s some common grounds in networking, databases, algorithms, signatures, comparing, etc…etc…

I am hoping that there is something around here, that I haven’t found/run into yet, but it seems that the Device Detection Process has a LONG WAY TO GO…

I went with SENSE thinking they are the company i’ve seen ‘doing this’ the longest and I didn’t even really consider ‘the other guys’ but after my experience, i’m starting to wonder how the other guys are doing in that department.

I was really looking forward to the ‘device detection’ aspect of this process, as much as I appreciate seeing in realtime, solar and grid usage, I really wanted to know what was consuming the power and when.

I would like to believe after some period of monitoring/recording time, that you should be able to turn devices on/off and SENSE would be able to detect that change/signature, and either match it up with something previously submitted from the SENSE Community and/or ask for help with input.

Just some random items/thoughts here:

(1) I have a couple Air Conditioners in my house, one is a 5 ton, one is 1 1/2 ton for a smaller space, for my home office.

It found the smaller one fairly quickly but not the BIG one even with it running and cycling often enough.

(2) Pool pumps - Is there something up with detecting them? I have seen something about 240v equipment but not sure how it applies, I see it on the OVERALL USAGE, but it doesn’t detect it as a device

(3) Other pumps - I have a POND and various water features also with the pool mentioned above, they One of them is constantly On, and i’ve turned it ON/OFF and confirmed it in the LIVE METER, but it doesn’t detect it as a device or the other pumps.

(4) TVs and Monitors, I have LOTS of them for for personal and work related usage, it sees the power, doesn’t detect them as devices

(5) Misc Cameras and alarms and other electric gadgets, same as above.

After what I saw while browsing, there isn’t anything we can do but wait?

With a ‘smart bar’ is it possible to actually detect what the devices are or is that just ON/OFF ability?

Thank you!

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You don’t say how long your have had your Sense running, but you probably need at least a couple months of AC for good detections. A lot depends on the type of AC unit as week - variable speed seems to be trickier to detect, and take more time.

Can’t say much about pool or pond pumps since I don’t have any, but again, variable speed tends to make detection more challenging.

Anything electronic (TVs, Computers), that has a DC power supply, doesn’t really have an on or off signature at the wall outlet, so that’s where you should make use of a supported smart plug like the HS110/HS300. The HS300 is the “smartbar”.

https://help.sense.com/hc/en-us/articles/360012089393-What-smart-plugs-are-compatible-with-Sense-

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i agree with you… is there an advanced mode, a super user group?
i look at my realtime and see spikes that i know what the device is but i cannot interact with the app
a am not a wait and see tupe of personality if i see a 16 watt spike when i turn on my cpap machiene i know what it is… i dont need to wait months… t think sense is doing itself a disservice to not use our feedback and expertiece, its like buying a tesla but having to put gas into it to make it run…

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There are several other threads on the challenges of effective human training of Sense on the community forum. There’s a lot of enthusiasm in the user base to help with the training, but it’s not that easy.

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Amazing event this morning!

I wake up, check sense and this morning it found A/C #2!

Awesome!

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Thanks for the info!

My pond and water feature pumps are not variable.

My pool pump is, but even it’s on specially on max speed for hours, I’d like to think it’s got a pretty good/clear signature!

Someone mentioned about an advanced mode or something… It’d be great to have something like that where you tell sense to get in that mode and your turn on/off devices in some pattern, and then sense could hyper monitor, record, and compare the signature over time and come up with a match or at least a unique signature in your location allowing you to name/label it.

I’m not sure why that wouldn’t work…

As I don’t know what the smart bars do exactly (I’ll go look into it after this post) what I don’t know is will that help to Identity they device, or only label the device that is attached to bar #1 port #2 ?

I don’t really want 10+ bars around my house and plug and leave things plugged into them.

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I"m not sure what advanced mode someone may have mentioned. Sense does have a beta team who sometimes see features before everyone else, but otherwise we are all running using the same hardware/software. no advanced mode that i’ve ever heard of. As for why we can’t label, Kevin posted that one article. If you search for “why can’t we train this”, you will find several threads that go quite deep into how Machine Learning systems work. Supervised, un supervised, neural etc… Its not as easy as anyone thinks. And the simple reason I say that - if it was, Sense would do it and we would have the feature. They want this product to work as much as anyone else does.

Pumps - something to keep in mind. Devices that run for a long time can take much longer to detect, or aren’t detected at all. In an overly simplistic way, Sense is looking at what the device looks like when it first turns on. That first spike you see when you turn something on, that is one of the key aspects that helps sense know what just turned on. Devices that run for a long time don’t cycle as often, so it means Sense isn’t seeing that on spike as often. Devices that also “Start slow” don’t always have that nice clear spike at power on. Some larger pumps take a few seconds to get up to speed and may not have as clear of a start up signature.

As for smart plugs and smart power strips. Its all up to you. There are advantages and disadvantages to them beyond just helping identify power loads in Sense. The only supported models (HS110, HS300 and Wemo Insight) can feed power data directly into Sense. So if you get a HS300 (power strip) and plug in 6 single devices, and label the ports in the TP-Link Kasa app, those 6 devices will now appear in Sense and track the power of those 6 devices. This is especially useful for those “Always On” devices that won’t ever get singled out in the Sense App.
An advantage of using something like the smart power strip is that it a)might let you know that your smart TV is pulling 20watts, even when off. You can then in turn, use the app for the power strip to turn off that outlet when you aren’t using the TV and save yourself some power.

One thing that is often misunderstood about the smart plugs and Sense. While Sense is being fed data from the smart plug, it is not using that data to train itself (for some of the same reasons we as users can’t train sense).
So you can’t put a plug on a device for a few months hoping that Sense learns it, and then remove the plug and hope Sense still knows what is going on. The Sense team has said they are collecting the Smart plug data so it may be used in the future to help with detections, but that is not something that happens now.

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Great reply, thank you!

I do know a little more about smart plugs after doing some reading, as well as your input.

The advanced mode is not something that is available now, it was mentioned by someone else that it’d be nice to have something like that, and I am +1 on that. :grinning:

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@JustinAtSense

I was looking over my posts, trying to find something I thought included you, where I didn’t respond initially, as I have been ‘holding my breath’ but I think you, or another SENSE associate, mentioned something ‘coming’ in regards to ‘device detection improvements’?

I didn’t wan to ask then, but it’s been a month + and thought I might dare to ask, ‘how’s that coming’?

i just had one of my microwaves detected, after 3 months of using sense.

i’m struggling with my Office AC, i have several messages into support.

I’m still looking to find my pool and pond pumps

hope all is well with you in this crazy new world of ours!

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Hey @joesantanapersonal!
Sorry to keep you holding your breath here :). I would expect to see an update from our end towards the end of the month, but things can change based on how testing goes.

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Hey! at least that’s something, thank you!

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@JustinAtSense Are you still around?

Here I am, coming up on just about a year ago…

What’s the latest?

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Hi @joesantanapersonal - we posted an update on Device Detection here with a video interview from two members of our Data Science team. Since detection updates are changes in the back-end, updates we make on our end aren’t necessarily obvious. You can find the update below and we have more things coming up towards the end of this year.

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