Sense Home

It’s been almost two years since I installed SENSE in order to monitor our home’s solar energy production versus electrical energy consumption overall, in greater detail than we were able to using NeurIO. I have to say, while Sense beats NeurIO and everyone else in terms of the APP’s layout/presentation, Sense’s AI algorithm has not improved much in all that time. It’s performance is poor at best and almost useless overall. After several reboots and two complete deletions and reinstalls of my Sense account, Its AI algorithm still can only identify a random 6 or so devices including one or two major consumers of electricity as well as some minor appliances/devices. There seems no rhyme or reason to it with false positives as well as some seemingly inocuous devices like a coffeemaker or two locked on seemingly for good until suddenly they aren’t anymore. Meanwhile, the large attic exhaust fan, Kitchen Convection Oven, Kitchen SuperSteam Oven , and Kitchen Induction Cooktop plus the Home HVAC system go unrecognised. Use of the “merge” function can totally confuse the algorithm as well as myself in pinning down a device amidst the clutter. Currently, I see no hope for improvement and looking around for a substitute only PowerX and Emporia stand out because of their use of dedicated clamps on selected circuits. But they create other problems in terms of panel overcrowding, etc. as well as the fact that aren’t actually totally comprensive either. Sigh…..

I’ve had this installed for a full day now and I must say I am loving this device. We are currently experiencing power outages in the area due to ice storms and I’m using this to help me identify which circuits I can run on my generator without overloading it. The real time usage meter and data logger is fantastic. Very simple installation if you are comfortable in an electrical panel. However, this app is missing 1 very simple, but crucial feature in my opinion. It uses AI to “learn” the electrical signature of you household items over time and slowly create “bubbles” for each unique item. This allows you to quickly identify what is running at any given time and also track its total energy consumption over time. That is nice, but for someone like me who is willing to take a few hours to manually identify each item and speed up this process, it would be nice to have that option. For example, I can clearly see in the app and hear when my HVAC kicks on, yet I don’t have the ability in the app to go ahead and name it. After a full day it still hasn’t created a bubble for my HVAC even though it’s very cold out and cycles on and off a lot right now. Please add this “manual identification” feature and this is easily a 5 star app and product.

Sense is my second try with an energy monitoring product at home. I'm minimally looking for something which can reliably show power use for the whole house in real time, and trends over time. Identifying and summarizing power use for each device in the house using machine learning is super cool. It's a hard problem; getting that right for the biggest power draws in the house will be useful. The monitor install went smoothly with some improvising to extend a cable which connec...ts the monitor to its breaker so we could mount the Wi-Fi antenna high on the wall (our panel is flush with the wall in the garage). Configuring the sense monitor with sense's iOS app was incredibly easy. It took about a week for sense to begin detecting devices in our house, though we had house guests for the first few days and all that activity likely made sense's job harder with more things turning on and off at the same time. There are a few features I'd love to see in the sense app. I'd like to see a feature which you can use to help sense identify part of "Unknown" when you're running a known device and have the app open showing power use in real time. I'd also like some help with identifying where "always on" things might be, perhaps by turning off all the breakers except sense monitor's, and turning each breaker back on one at a time. And I'd like an ML model that will recognize my Chevy Volt's "charger", the second biggest power draw in our house after the heat pump. The company seems to be thoughtful in its designs, actively listening to customers, and is responsive, which is so refreshing.