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15 y.o. water heater replacement

Device: Water Heater
Make: State
Model:
Estimated Savings:

One of the primary reasons I wanted to get a Sense was to see how my 15 year old water heater was doing. After the first month of Sense data, it was looking like the water heater alone was about 15% of my electrical use.
I had already made the decision that when the water heater needed to be replaced, I’d replace it with a hybrid model. As if on cue, and only a month after the Sense was installed, the water heater stopped working.
I decided it would be better to bite the bullet and replace it without attempting a fix. Yes, the hybrid is significantly more expensive, but it should pay for additional cost over traditional electrical water heater w/n five years.

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Dehumidifier

Device: Dehumidifier
Make: Haier
Model:
Estimated Savings:

I had an older model dehumidifier given to me by parents that I used intermittently. I knew it was not the most efficient but assumed it would be okay since only used it a couple times a week. Within a few days of turning it on Sense identified it and showed me how wrong I was. That little dehumidifier, for my basement, was the biggest energy hog running, by far! By replacing it with a more efficient model, the energy savings will pay for it in a matter of a few months.

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Hot water circulator running at wrong time of day

Device: Water Heater
Make: Rheem
Model: Marathon 80
Estimated Savings:

I use time of day billing with my utility company to get lower rates during off peak hours. I installed a hot water circulator on my water heater to reduce water waste waiting for hot water at the tap. But I set the circulator timer to run 15 minutes every hour during peak rate hours, which caused the water heater to turn on every hour even when we weren’t using hot water! By turning off the circulator during the 8 hours of peak time the water heater only turns on if we use hot water.

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Sense paid for itself in 1st month!

Device: Water Heater
Make: State
Model: EDT802ORT
Estimated Savings:

We live in Massachusetts so the cost per kwh is inherently much more expensive than average in USA, hence the higher savings in adopting sense. Our estimated total annual savings will be around $2,500 at current supply distribution rates and our August 2019 vs August 2018 usage. Notably 2018 was much warmer in Massachusetts than in 2019, but as per the sense analysis, seasonality couldn’t explain the delta in savings we achieved… the culprit was the water circulation pump draining the 80 gallon water heater on a continuous basis!

We had been living for one year in our newly constructed home and immediately took issue with our electric bill. Our whole street is comprised of newly built houses by the same builder and all of them were running equally high electric bills yet with no knowledge of the source. We asked for a MassSave inspection and they determined our home to be maxed out in energy efficiency (e.g. appliances, foam insulation, LEDs, etc). We had already turned down the water heater dial to 120º and our Nest HVAC was getting several green leafs, thus we were told our electric bill was the cost of living in a large house with six people and we couldn’t really do much about it.

We installed Sense to try to get a better handle of what was going on. The main culprit turned out to be the water circulation pump which has a small wattage usage but causes the water heater to continuously run. We purchased a Kasa smart plug on put the circulation pump on a timer, which proved to be immediately effective in lowering our wattage usage. However, we realized that the water heater was still running quite a bit during the day so we installed an Aquanta to control for the water heater hours of operation. The end result was a 1st month savings that paid for sense (!!!!).

Everyone tells you that the water heater is one of the main culprits but not even the experts put two and two together. Only with sense did we identify that the water circulation pump was the main problem. Since then we’ve enjoyed calculating other energy savings/costs. For instance, we installed a well which we knew would save us a ton of money in water (and pay for itself in two years as a result) but we didn’t know the cost of running the well pump. Sense didn’t quite identify the well pump yet (b/c it struggles with variable motors) but we were able to see that when the irrigation went on it correlated with a 2kwh spike in sense’s Power Meter. Other benefits have continued to pop us as I now know how long our cleaning service actually vaccums the floors b/c it is its own separate device. We also teach our kids about energy use as sense can tell when they leave their bathroom lights on. The list goes on and on. No doubt there are plenty of opportunities for improvement but it already paid for itself and their customer service is absolutely phenomenal.

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Already paid for itself

Device: Other Heater
Make:
Model:
Estimated Savings:

This thing already paid for it self. I just moved into an older home that used only electric for heat and cooking. It was converted to gas. The Sense was put in and three days later it came up with heater 1, and heater 2. It’s still 80 to 90 degrees outside. I went hunting for two, 2000 watts devices. Over 4000 total running all the time.

I found two baseboard heaters running full blast in a remote part of the basement no one ever goes. I was told that the previous owner had electric bills over $500. For a relatively small home with two people living in it.

This could have been going on for years. They never removed the old electric heaters from there when they switched to gas.

Thank you Sense!!!

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Sense helped me find overactive AC unit

Device: AC
Make:
Model:
Estimated Savings:

AC was now running 24/7. Even on nights were the outside temperature was at least 10 colder than my thermostat setting. I had an HVAC company come and perform a system maintenance (clean filters, condensers, add refrigerant, etc.). The difference from July 31 (107.7 kWh) to August 1 (77.3 kWh) was dramatic.

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Sense helped with faulty Solar Water Heater System

Device: Water Heater
Make:
Model:
Estimated Savings:

I discovered that my solar water heater system was not working properly. I noticed that during the middle of a summer day, the heat exchanger was not circulating water. A bit of YouTube searching pointer to a possible temperature sensor problem and sure enough, the wiring at the roof was broken. After fixing it, the system started working.

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Attic fan cooling unnecessarily

Device: Fan
Make:
Model:
Estimated Savings:

I woke up early one morning around 5 AM, and checked the Sense app. I noticed that the electrical usage was high for that time of day.
Sense showed that the attic fan was running.

Once I got into the attic, I realized that the thermostat was mounted incorrectly. As a result, the fan was running for much longer than necessary. The solution was to correctly mount the thermostat so that it would turn off the fan at the set temperature.

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Always On Culprits

Device: Router
Make:
Model:
Estimated Savings:

We’ve had Sense for about a month and we love it. We have the Solar version and it is so great to see both sides of the story.

Our Always On was about 200W which kinda bugged me as we really only have a few items that are, indeed, always on.

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Hot water heater in Performance Mode

Device: Water Heater
Make: Rheem
Model:
Estimated Savings:

I was getting electric bills in excess of 300 a month, which I knew to be about twice my normal. I purchased Sense to try and help me find the problem. Right out of the box I could see something kicking in 3 times an hour for like 13kwh. With a little process of elimination because Sense had not identified the unit yet, I was able to identify the culprit as the hot water heater. The hot water heater was really new, installed about 2 years ago and supposed to be energy efficient. I went and checked the setting and found it in performance mode. Set it to Energy Saver mode, and it uses a 10th of the energy it was using before.