Sense Home Energy Monitor 4+

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.

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 got Sense with Solar around 6 months ago when I installed a solar array. The inverters for the solar array monitor power produced but not power consumed by your home. Sense allows you to do both in a very sleek app. Device detection is automatic via their machine learning algorithm and while not perfect, it has reliably detected most of my frequently used appliances both big and small. There are some quirks where it will think two similar devices are the same thing (small space heater and a coffee pot in my case) or it will recognize a device when it turns on but not as it ramps up power usage (my electric boiler has 4 heating elements, it only recognizes the 1st one). I personally find this very cool even though it’s not perfect. The power monitor works superbly for overall home energy usage and allows you to find energy hogs you may not have noticed otherwise. I’ve lowered my energy bill by tweaking different light bulbs, finding vampire drain devices, and swapping small devices for more energy efficient ones where possible. Overall I give it 5 stars even with the mild shortcomings. And they are still actively developing better algorithms which will improve over time with updates.