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 * Sense Energy Monitor Review: Making Your Home Smarter


SENSE ENERGY MONITOR REVIEW: MAKING YOUR HOME SMARTER

 * By David Cardinal on March 31, 2020 at 11:15 am
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Not everyone obsesses about their home energy use. But as rates climb and
concern over the impact using electricity from the grid has on climate change,
it is becoming increasingly popular to try to get a handle on what you’re using,
which devices or appliances are using it, and whether there is anything
practical you can do about it. In particular, for anyone thinking of investing
in solar, each watt is real dollars, and reducing consumption — at least up to a
point — can be a more cost-effective place to start.

That’s where the Sense home energy monitor ($299) comes in. The core of the
Sense is a wireless current and voltage meter that installs into your electrical
box and reads out how much power you are consuming at any given time. So far,
that’s a pretty standard piece of gear. Where the interesting part comes in is
that Sense will attempt to figure out the load created by specific appliances,
allow you to label them as you figure out what they are, and then provide
reports on the consumption from each device and estimated running cost. I’ve had
one installed for just over a month, and have lots of findings to report.




INSTALLING THE SENSE METER

The Sense is actually pretty easy to install. It does need to be wired to a
240-volt breaker, either dedicated or shared. Its sensors are the traditional
“clamp” type current meters that can simply be placed around each leg supplying
electricity to your house. If your panel has an easily accessible main breaker
to shut it off, and you’re comfortable messing with circuit breakers, none of
this is super-hard. But if you’re in any doubt, a licensed electrician should be
able to do it in 30 minutes or less. Ideally, you’ll mount the Sense inside the
electrical box, if there’s room, and run its antenna cable out through one of
the punch outs. In our case, there wasn’t room in the box, so we used the
provided mounting bracket to attach the Sense to the wall and ran the sensor
wires into the box, as you can see from the attached photo.

If you have solar, then you can get an optional ($50) additional pair of current
sensors to monitor your solar production. In our case, Sense helped us use one
of those to monitor a third electrical leg instead since our house has a
separate sub-panel for solar loads. Then you complete setting it up by doing the
typical IoT drill of downloading an app, connecting to the meter directly,
teaching it about your Wi-Fi, and then setting up an account with Sense that you
can access from the app or the web.


USING THE SENSE APP

The Sense mobile and web apps both allow you to look at a chart of your power
consumption over time. They also feature graphs of power consumption by device —
once Sense has identified a device — and a cute bubble chart of your largest
power consumers currently. You can export data, add details for devices Sense
has found, and see a list of devices alongside their current consumption.




SENSE IS A SLOW, BUT PATIENT, LEARNER

Sense learns about devices in your home or office by patiently watching power
consumption, and looking for patterns in power usage. It combines your data with
its database of devices found by other users to try to guess when it has found
an identifiable power load. Once it does, it will attempt to put it in a
category like “Light” or “Heat” and ask you if you recognize it and want to
label it further.

Because Sense requires a lot of power cycles to identify devices, it can take
days, weeks, or even months for it to sort out devices that don’t turn on and
off all the time. In fact, it doesn’t have a clue about devices that are always
on and lumps them into an “Always On” category. In our case, it found our
refrigerator, oven, and microwave within a couple of weeks, although it seems to
have lumped our Dishwasher and Instant Pot cooker together into a single
appliance for some reason.


USING SENSE TO ISOLATE POWER HOGS MANUALLY

In our case, since we both run businesses from our house (all the time, not just
now), a lot of our power consumption is computers, servers, and networking
equipment. I was hopeful that Sense could learn to identify some of that and
give us an idea of which ones were power hogs. Unfortunately, even after a
month, it couldn’t. However, it did let us do a much more effective job of
measuring them manually than we used to. Previously we had to either plug each
device in turn into a portable power meter and let it run, or have someone with
a radio out at our electric meter watching the change in power consumption when
it was turned off and then back on. Now it was easy to stand by the electrical
box and watch power consumption on the app as breakers were flipped off and back
on (note that first, we made sure sensitive devices were on UPS backups, so they
didn’t lose power, they just stopped drawing it from the box). That was helpful,
but not entirely fulfilling. Fortunately, the folks at Sense showed me there is
a better approach.




SMART PLUGS ARE PRETTY IMPORTANT

Sense has integrated with a variety of smart plugs and power strips. Once you
activate one of those, not only can you see the load in the devices’s app, but
the plug is automatically discovered by Sense and added to your device
inventory. For a power strip, each plug appears separately. We tried this out
with a Kasa Smart Plug Power Strip ($79.97) that provides six measured outlets
along with 3 USB charging ports. By placing it in our “machine room” we were
able to easily label our NAS devices and network equipment into the Sense app.
Eventually, I’ll probably get some single smart plugs for our desktop computers
and cable box. You can also control devices that are connected to a smart strip
or plug, so if you find some that are power hogs, you can set up schedules for
them that way.


HERE’S WHAT WE LEARNED THAT WE DIDN’T KNOW BEFORE

We’ve been pretty obsessive about trying to quantify our electricity usage for a
while — especially since we spent a lot on a solar installation 20 years ago,
and upgraded it again recently, keeping our cost per KWh top of mind. So we
already had a good handle on the easy stuff, but we’ve still learned plenty.
First, it was a relief to find out that our 30-year-old refrigerator is actually
fairly energy efficient, so we could stop worrying about whether we needed to
replace it. Second, it was very helpful to start to get a handle on the 24 x 7
load of some of the NAS units that we mostly use to store backups. I realized
that by time-shifting when we ran backups and the power schedules of those
servers, we could save some power. It also makes clear when one of our servers
or desktops isn’t falling asleep as scheduled (a problem I’ve had frequently
with Windows), so that we knew to debug the issue. It can even alert you when a
particular device powers on or off, although we haven’t really used that feature
yet.

Adding a Sense to your home probably won’t change your life, and if you’re not
already curious enough about your energy usage to be trying to figure it out on
your own, it is unlikely to turn you into an energy sleuth. But if you are
curious about where your power goes, and whether there are steps you can take to
reduce your electricity demand, then it is a unique and helpful tool.



Now Read:

 * Going Solar Part 1: How to Plan a Successful Solar Panel Project
 * Going Solar Part 2: Ensuring the Project Is a Success
 * PCMag: How to Set Up Your Smart Home: A Beginner’s Guide








TAGGED IN

 * climate change
 * solar energy
 * home improvement
 * electricity meter
 * Sense home energy monitor
 * Sense solar sensors

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