Sense finds free water for my garden and yard

Device: AC
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My house has a basement sump pump. I was looking for a way to monitor the pump via Sense to make sure it’s working and get advanced notice of potential pump failures so my first indicator of a problem wouldn’t be a wet basement. Using Sense, I was able to set up an alert to notify me if the pump hasn’t run for a defined period of time. But during this process, I realized that the pump runs a lot in brief cycles of on-off. I noticed it runs 300-500 times per month during June and July.

Electrical spikes

Device: Other Appliance
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When I had my solar system put on my house in Florida about two years ago, it came with Sense. While the solar was being put on I also had the electrical enclosure and the circuit breakers replaced. Within days, I noticed electrical spikes while observing the electrical draw in the Sense app on my phone. I finally called an electrician to look into it.

Turns out, the installer for the electrical enclosure used wire nuts rather than NSI connectors. My high voltage oven and air conditioner lines were both arcing, the wire caps showed signs of overheating in one case melting. The electrician put on NSI connectors, the spikes disappeared, and a house fire was avoided.

In Florida, I have ceiling fans in every room and the Lanai. They are always on. Because of Sense, I have my Always On down to about 300W and I can see the house is well below average usage.

Getting the hot tub heater out of peak usage

Device: Pool Heater
Make: Mecana
Model:
Estimated Savings:
Using Sense, I found one of my big usages was a hot tub heater which came on randomly every several hours (and a lot more in the winter, as expected). I purchased an ECO WiFi power switch box with a timer that allows me to turn off the heater during peak periods, and I shifted to turning on the heater in the super off peak beginning of the day before 6 am when electricity costs 7 cents a Kw hour.

Sense calculated cost of TV in standby mode

Device: TV
Make: Sharp
Model: LC-50LBU711U
Estimated Savings:

After plugging my tv into a Kasa smart plug and linking to Sense, I quickly learned the tv was drawing about 22w when “off”. With IFTTT, I created a recipe using Google WiFi that turns off the Kasa plug when the tv disconnects from the network. Estimated savings is about $40/year!

Bathroom Fan

Device: Fan
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Replaced one of our bathroom fans as it quit working. Out of curiosity started to compare it in sense to our other bathroom fans and the energy usage was ridiculous.

Determined newer bathroom fans for the other bathrooms would save us considerably.

Always On costing a bundle

Device: Other Electronics
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Model:
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I’ve got a Sense system that was recommended and installed by my electrician last February. It was never really meant to be a cost saving item, more of a hobby/interest item for entertainment. But I got hooked. My Always On was running at about 950W all the time and I couldn’t figure out what it was! I started chasing big users and have gotten it down now to 339W. Not only did this journey help me learn about my house (we just moved in last year), but alerted me to a mini-fridge that wasn’t sealing correctly, a wine fridge that was running way too frequently, an old A/C unit that wasn’t efficient, and then a whole slew of smaller electronics that I use sporadically, but were drawing a ton of power because I wasn’t unplugging them!
I’ve been using Sense Solar as a bit of a personal challenge and trying to make sure I lower my usage as much as possible below the production because in Massachusetts I actually get full credit for overproduction!

baseboard heater sky rocketed electric bills

Device: Other Heater
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I bought my house and the electric company put me on equal payments like previous owner, slowly slowly the equal payment went up to $680 a month. I called the solar company and seeing the bills they mentioned we don’t have any solution that can help with that much usage, and person from solar company suggested i use a device called Sense (used by one of his friend). Got sense installed and very soon it detected the 3 base board heaters in the family room racking up all the usage. immediately turned it off and my equal payments are down to $220 now from $680. My energy consumption is 78% down month over month compare to each month last year. With sense i rooted out old freezer , super old AC. no device at home goes undetected now. Bought a new 2nd holiday house and very first energy related device I will be installing will be a new Sense monitor.

Identified a poor Fujitsu install immediately

Device: Heat Pump
Make: Fujitsu
Model:
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We decided to change out our heating system on our small home. Every company that came pushed mini splits. We had 5 quotes all for about the same price. We took the plunge on a Fujitsu system from a larger company in case we ever needed service we wanted a place that had a decent amount of techs working for them. What we didn’t realize was how poorly trained the sales person was. After settling on 3 zones instead of 4 due to cost and a room we don’t use much we had it installed. Everything was great the day after the install when it was 46F out. Fast forward a week and it’s now 4 deg F at night. I woke up to a 60 degree home and a condensor fan that sounded like it was trying to take off to deep space. I opened the Sense app to see almost 6,000 watts of power being drawn and it had been rapid cycling all night. 3 weeks later of back and forth and another frigid night and the company finally did a full load calc on the house…..OOOPS! They under sized it by 40%. My poorly insulated home uses as much power as a house 3-4 times it’s size. Not only that but the rapid cycling was due to a serious leak at a union. The company had to remove the system as it would have doubled our utility bill unless we started insulating. That’s in the plans but our tired old heating was priority. This device and app provided quick evidence that the system was not right from the beginning. I learned a ton about mini splits due to this debacle and if it weren’t for the immediate evidence I would have been questioning for months if the system was correct.

Dehumidifier running constantly

Device: Dehumidifier
Make: Hisense
Model: DH70K1G
Estimated Savings:

I live in a high humidity area and my crawlspace requires a dehumidifier. The settings chosen would leave it running almost constantly. It would have cost $600/year to operate. I was able to modify the settings to get it down to about $300/yr. I am planning to seal up the crawlspace and I expect to gain a little more. I never would have known it used so much power.