Category: Faulty Device

Having just moved to Hawaii, I was flabbergasted by my first utility bill. The first order of business was to install two Sense monitors (I have two 200A panels and one 100A panel for the swimming pool). The second order of business was to look into installing a PV system. Fast forward a few months and we got a system designed and installed. It consisted of 62 solar panels and 4 Tesla Powerwalls. In order to minimize the reconfiguration of the electrical panels we decided to only back up the 200A panels in case of an outage. This left the swimming pool pump and heater off the backup system, which is fine. Importantly though, those items would be fed from the solar and battery. They are the biggest sinks for energy so I wanted to make sure that we used solar/battery for it as we don’t have net metering here. Installers turned on the solar system and everything was working fine. However, using my Sense monitor on the pool panel I saw that when the heater was on I was drawing that power from the grid instead of from the solar/battery. If I didn’t have that insight I would have gotten a big surprise at the end of the month with all that power drawn from the grid. I called my installer and explained what Sense was showing me and he sensed [;-)] that I knew what I was talking about. He came back and reconfigured the CTs and now my pool panel uses our plentiful solar power.

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.

While on vacation I opened the sense app several times to see my solar production and noticed a 1500watt other bubble that on. The bubble kicked on the day after we left and was on all day which puzzled me. The next day, I sent my brother to my house and had him flip breakers off one at a time until the bubble disappeared. Which lead him to my pantry which had an old Montgomery wards standup deep freezer. The deep freezer’s compressor locked up and didn’t have any type thermal overload. It was also full of food. My brother said he couldn’t touch the compressor and even the cord was really hot. He moved the meat (1 cow, 1 pig and random stuff) into several family members freezers. The new freezer I purchased also takes about 15% of the energy to run than the old one. This was also before labs…. My brother also bought a sense meter a few days later.