I’ve attached a screenshot from the Sense app. The circled ovals show a device that has been cycling from the day I installed Sense (well over a year ago). It pulls 60 watts every so often for the same period. It corresponds to the seat heater in a Brondell washlet in my master bedroom toilet.
If I turn off the seat heater while it is running, power consumption reduces by 60 watts immediately. Likewise, if I turn on the seat heater, power consumption increases by 60 watts immediately.
But Sense hasn’t identified this as a device yet. Why? And what can I do to assist with identification?
I have the same question, different device, my pool filter motor. For the entire summer it ran 4 times a day in 2 hour increments. Exact same RPM and current draw (1,284 watts). Sense has not detected this device, can anyone suggest why this is? Will there eventually be a way to manually add a device?q
Based on reading, I think that some of these things need preliminary model development on the Sense side.
Heating devices, microwaves, garbage disposals, hvac, and a few other things all came relatively early on. I think they just had good models set up right away and Sense then had to do a little pattern fitting.
I get the feeling that beyond those things which have had good models developed, Sense can’t pick things out from scratch - electronic vehicles come to mind. There needs to be a good model in the place first, because as much as Sense was developed from voice recognition technology, appliance recognition is a little different. Not necessarily more complex, but different.
And it appears to me the models for the 4-5 devices you point to are not all that good. A year of modeling has passed and Sense doesn’t reliably detect even those few devices.
In my case it’s identifying those things with 90% or above accuracy. It seems to have them down well, e.g. not confusing them with something else, my main issue is identifying that they’re on when there’s some degree of background noise. I wonder if chronic background noise affects their ability to be identified in the first place? What things, like televisions, cause chronic background noise?
For me it detects the water heater, the garage door opener and the 10 year
old micro wave. Sense has never detected soft slow start devices like the
Lennox multi speed air handler, the GE high end stove top or ceiling fans
with soft start. Sense has found a few devices in the 10-20 Watt size, if
they have high inrush characteristics, but it never puts a identify to them
and after a few months I delete the device. It did id the Keurig but that
broke! I suspect soft start devices, which lack inrush spikes are quite
difficult and devices with slow ramped startups will never be detected with
the current algorithms.
Just a note on washlets… We have 3 Toto washlets (really Neorest toilets) in our house and Sense has identified both the Toto fans and wash pumps with 95% accuracy. But the seat heater hasn’t been detected yet, despite running all the time or in timed daily cycles.
Neorest 500s.
Our Sense detects 3 different flavors of fan cycles that don’t correlate to the 3 different Totos in the House. One is a 16s ave. cycle, another is 1m46s ave. and the last is a 2m11s average. All have an 1100W startup spike, followed by a 630W steady state.The cleaning pump showed up more recently, a 700W spike followed by 420W steady state. Haven’t seen the seat heater show up.
For my house (kept about about 70F right now), with the heater is at the low setting, it runs for 18-19 seconds and consumes 60W. When I raise the setting to medium or high, the run time is longer.
BTW, this is for the Brondell Swash S900 washlet. The manual states that the seat heater consumes 60W, and this is exactly what Sense shows.
That seems to vary a lot with ambient temperature and how often the washlet is used. Also, if the cover is on or off. I’ll turn on the washlet in the guest bathroom and update this next week.
Thanks Ashok. I think that works out to about 10 watts continuously, which is the figure I was looking for. Here in California that’s about $30/year of electricity for those of us in the top tiers.
Alan I like your hypothesis about soft start. Similar to everyone’s experience here I’ve been waiting for many devices to be recognized…one year in from install. I won’t go into lengthy detail but I do have a recommendation for Sense where the device in question is already “smart”. Why don’t you just integrate with the companion app and be done with it. I think I get the fact that Sense wishes to do “good science” but I’m getting tired of waiting for that. In 1 specific example: my 20 yr/old garage door opener was found quickly. It died so I got a new WiFi enabled LiftMaster (soft start)
. It been 5 months with “no joy” finding it. However the LiftMaster app sends me an email/text every time it moves. Pattern recognition can’t get any easier. Ditto with my BMW i3, Wemo, Richio, IFTTT, etc apps. Sense: you are making this way too difficult.
The failure to integrate with IOT is something that should be addressed ASAP. It would make Sense that much smarter that mich quicker. I’ve had my most recent monitor running for a few months and still have around 35% power consumption Unknown.
