Starting over with the Sense Home Energy Monitor (day 3)
You may be looking at my previous articles and wondering why Day 4 is Day 3… we had an extended internet outage here so I’m not counting yesterday. As a note, when you’re without internet, the device is not particularly useful. However I’m told it keeps a lot of data while internet-less to transmit later on which may be why it’s acting like a champ today.
As of this morning it identified the microwave, coffee pot (I think,) furnace. It’s identified two refrigerators so far (I’m thinking the deep freezer and the fridge, although last go around the freezer and fridge sides detected separately,) water heater, dryer, and a couple of other devices that I’m going to have to track down.
I’ve got to move and set the Flex sensors back up, but that’s for a nicer day.
I discovered quite to my surprise that I could turn anything connected to a TP-Link Kasa switch on and off through the Sense app today. I think I must have finger flubbed and discovered that. Accidentally disabled something and spent 20 minutes pulling a doorbell apart thinking Nest was out to get me.
It’s not been terribly accurate with the stove detection. Turning the stove on high for example doesn’t detect it, but I turn it down a bit and it does.
It seems slightly better since the reset. I wonder if it just was loaded up with bad data from the events we’ve had which have been: 230v line becoming disconnected, not fully closed clamp, potential connector oxidation, and a few other things in the past 3-4 years.
I almost wonder if it would be able to detect some of my devices on its own without the Kasa switches, but that’s maybe for later.
I still really really want a training mode for this where you can trigger it in the app and say “please train this device” and it will ask you to plug it in, monitor, ask you to turn it on, monitor, and use it in various ways.
You can get a Sense Home Energy Monitor at Amazon (which makes us some sort of commission,) or on the company’s website.
