Day: June 9, 2023

The following is a situation that Sense helped me resolve that not only saved money, but more importantly possibly avoided fire and loss of property as well as life because of a defective electrical device.

With the help of Sense, I was able to uncover a problem that existed for months. I run Sense in a MUCH different way than anyone else does, but it serves my purposes perfectly. I installed Sense INSIDE a commercial Onan diesel generator for load management purposes while the genset connected to a house with multiple electrical services. While testing using Sense, it recorded very frequent power spikes of about 1.2kw that were happening continuously 24×7. This has been happening for months. I was able to narrow it down to one of the apartments and discovered it was an electric heater that was plugged in and forgotten about. I learned that the electric heater may have been defective since the power cycles were happening way to frequent. Once the heater was disconnected, the power meter flat lined as it should since no additional loads were turned on during the test. I would have never found this problem if I was using analog meters since the blimps of the needle would be barely seen and not recorded for future analysis. If the heater was left alone for weeks or months and if it was defective could a house fire resulted? Possibly. Did this test end up saving money after eliminating the frequent and continuous 1.2kw spikes? YES.