store.sense.com

The advertising for this product is misleading. It is sold as finding all of your electrical devices in minutes or hours and finding lots of them. I’ve had my sense running now for 3 weeks, it’s found my AC and one of my refrigerators. I’m quite disappointed in that aspect. On the flip side it’s a great monitor especially with the solar portion and support is very responsive and the ability to make changes remotely is very useful.

I think that there are serious inaccuracies in the math used. The power flow for solar does not add up, at least in the first weeks. I think that device recognition could be greatly improved. I think that the flow for merging devices in the app could be improved. Those are the issues I am remembering at the moment.

I generally like my Sense. I was especially happy when you added the time of use rate plan feature so I could see what I was spending/generating in terms of dollars and associate a dollar amount with various devices. I remain a bit underwhelmed by the device detection, though. I still have an enormous "always on" blob that fluctuates a lot (read: not "always on" things are being included) and major appliances like an electric oven, numerous refrigerators, etc. aren't always reliably detected. Also, the "you're at x% of your usual" alert threshold is so low causing them to be so frequent that I've just started to ignore them (ok, it's 13% higher, what do I do?).

Been waiting almost a year for Sense to identify devices. Though is has gotten some, most of my usage is unidentified. So what’s the point if it can’t do that? And why will it not let the humans help by explicitly identifying loads?

I’ve had the unit for over a month now and so far it’s only figured out the coffee pot and a refrigerator. It would be great to label the spikes on the graph when I turn something on. I hope it starts figuring what things are soon. At this point, I’m not sure what it’s giving me besides a moving graph.