Category: Energy Hog

Fan was set to run more often than needed. Saw it activating often and reduced run time.

After my the floor heater was detected, I started realizing it was turning on every day several times for about 5 min. Each time consuming ~1700 w.
I asked my roommate if he had turned it on – He denied. We have a control thermostat for the floor heater in each bedroom. But both were off!! And the Floor Heater turned on everyday without permission, making almost no change to the home temperature although it was using +20 a month. We turned off the breaker for it and started saving money. I live in San Diego, so it is warm enough to not need that year round.

I was up one night checking out an issue with my furnace. And I turned on the attic fan to ventilate the attic for comfort and safety. It is a huge fan and, for me, a power hog. Hard to pin down the exact figure, but it uses something in the realm of 230 watt/hours give or take.

I finished up my work and forgot to turn it off. About 3 days later, while looking at the always on numbers, I noticed that the amount of power I was using was about 200W more than the average I had been using, and I had no way to account for it.

Since my Always On usually only adds up to about 50W, 250W is a pretty substantial. I started going around the house looking for things that I might have left plugged in and on. then I thought about the attic and considered the possibility that I might have left the attic lights on. And then it hit me. THE FAN!!!

And as I said in my post, I don’t feel comfortable leaving that fan running. I am very nervous about stuff like that running out of sight and out of mind. My primary concern (which I was told is unnecessary) is that it might catch on fire.

But I have other concerns about it that would cause $250 dollars to be the lower limit of my savings.

I worry that continuously sucking in cold air (during winter) and hot air (during winter and summer) will affect the efficiency of my Air Conditioner and Furnace. This is debatable, but I don’t believe air circulation in the attic is going to keep the temperature during the summer cool enough to help me. I expect hot air, in motion, will do more harm than hot air standing still.

Especially since my duct work and the insulation in the plenum of my unit needs to be replaced. My AC sweats because the insulation went bad, and so I don’t want to continuously suck in fresh humid air from the outside which could cause issues if the sweat leaks down into my insulation and sheetrock again (like it did before)

tl;dr, running that fan in the attic elevates my energy use substantially. On its own. and I fear it has the potential to cause my hvac electric bill to go up, and create damages that I would have to pay for.
Even if I am nuts, and $250 is the most I saved, I am happy Sense gave me peace of mind by helping me realize that the fan was still running in my attic.

We suffer from $800 per month power bills in the summer and $500 in winter. We always just pay the bill and complain about it but this year I decided to find out once and for all what was causing these high bills. After much research on different products I chose Sense. So far I have only been running it for a month and while I have not yet found all of the culprit it has REALLY opened my eyes to the actual power we consume. I had no idea some of these devices used so much power such as my computer, which is set on “high power” and runs 24 hours per day used 800watts at all times. I now set it on balanced power and shut it off when we are not home.

We found that ac unit was running for long periods, costing money when not home. Found out the controller was the issue and spent money to upgrade controller.

I’d read an article about an efficient hot water recirculation pump that was very efficient. It used about 5 W and had smarts that anticipated when the household demands hot water. I installed it in our newly constructed home, and was delighted with the instant hot water! After I installed Sense I noticed that our hot water energy usage was higher than expected. By eliminating the hot water recirculation I was able to halve the energy we were using for water heating. The water heater dropped from around 15% to 7% of our total energy usage!

The first thing Sense identified was the submersible well pump.
It was running 10 min on/ 10 min off 24/7. The pressure switch was stuck on.
Replaced the pressure switch and now it only runs for 1 minute, 4 or 5 times a day