Category: Faulty Device

I had an older (16 years) old HVAC system so I set up notifications for when it ran longer than 45 mins, 1 hour and 2 hours. This gave me trending info to see how the unit was struggling during peak cooling season.

My outdoor kitchen has a 6 gallon under sink hot water heater. It normally consumes 1.3kW at 1:30 duty cycle, so 1.04kWh/day. Yesterday morning it started to cycle on much more frequently…maybe a 4:10 duty cycle, thus 12.48kWh/day. I investigated and found the water heater leaking maybe half a gallon of hot water a minute into the drain under the outdoor sink. At an average of $0.25/kWh, this increase in electricity usage is $86/month. The water leak itself is 21600 gallons/month. Thank you Sense for helping me find this problem quickly; I may not have noticed otherwise until mid-Spring.

I noticed a 1200W spike in the Sense energy monitor that would cycle on for 2 minutes and off for 10. They cycle repeated for about 24 hours before I noticed it. I looked around the house for any appliances that someone may have left on like a space heater or coffee maker. I couldn’t find anything so started turning of breakers one at a time until I saw the cycle disappear. It was the circuit for our drying center. It’s a natural gas dryer on the bottom and an electric dryer rack on top for drying delicate items like sweaters. I turned the breaker back on and the cycle continued. The dryer control panel was dark indicating that the dryer was off but the upper cabinet was warm. The blower fan was not running. The found that heating element was on all the time and it was cycling off when the temperature reached the high limit. I traced the problem back to a relay that was stuck on.

Like many people here, I had wasted power, so I bought Sense. I just built my home within the last year and I am on well water. My new house was built to be fairly energy efficient. My power consumption on my new house was more than my 20year old prior house, significantly more. The houses are roughly the same size. This got me pretty curious as to why. The first day I installed sense it had not recognized any devices yet, which was fine, I was able to see a spike of about 2000 watts every 30 minutes or so, for about 30seconds each time. I knew my well pump used roughly that much power.

The first device detected was a sump pump the was turning on for a few seconds every 2 to 3 minutes, so I assumed the pump was detected or broken. There was moisture drops on the windows and it appeared to be unusally hot and humid downstairs. Upon viewing the pump I could see a steady flow of water in and didn’t know if this was normal, so I called a plumber. While waiting I went into the furnace room to see water flowing from the spout in the bottom of my hot water storage tank. That meant water was constantly flowing into the tank, triggering the furnace to attempt to heat the cold water constantly flowing through the tank. Finding this in time saved my water bill. My heat bill and solved our not enough hot water temperature problem. I only found it after they put in the sense devise and I saw the behavior and began investigating as I really didn’t know if that is how the devise worked! I may never have found it as the water flowed into the slanted cement floor, around the 2×4 wall which led to the hole cut in the floor for the tub drain pipe to go down to the sewer. That water flowed into the gravel which flowed the length of the tub underground and into my sump pump drainage reservoir which was working overtime to get rid of the water. Because Sense noticed it and brought it to my attention it may have months before water, heat and electric Bill’s would have caused me to look for a problem. This was the best investment I ever made to detect problems immediately instead of months of painful expense as the alternative. SO HAPPY I FOUND SENSE!

Problem: Faulty Sump Pump
Resolved: Replaced the pump

I happened to be checking the energy monitor today and noticed something off when the upstairs A/C unit kicked on. Watts usually jump and level off, but today, they would jump like normal, then continue to climb several thousand watts. Then drop off after a while. So I took my phone outside with the monitor on and started the unit up to see what was going on. Unit started up, compressor started, but the fan did not immediately start up. I could see it trying to move, but it was not getting going. Finally started up and found it to be very hot!! Turn off unit and tried to spin the fan freely, but could feel a lot of resistance. Motor housing was extremely hot.

Don’t think I would have noticed anything amiss without the Sense monitor until it failed completely. Could have been bad if that motor overheated even more!

Installed the new motor and capacitor this morning. Everything looks good now.

I think Sense definitely just paid for itself. Saved me someone coming out to diagnose the problem. If the motor continued to full failure and seized, it could have caused serious problems and additional costs.

On 7/4 we had a 6.4 earthquake in Ridgecrest. My pressure pump was running nonstop.
I saw this on my Sense App. I wandered around my home and discovered my deep well tank had burst spreading 4500 gal on the desert

I knew I needed a visit from my well maintainer. I called first thing on 7/5 and they said go get a replacement tank,ASAP. Bought my tank at 8 am the 5th. They delivered the tank on the 6th and it was installed on the 8th.
My installer said there were no more tanks in the area.

3 weeks later the hardware store said they were getting their first delivery of tanks.

Without support from my Sense monitor, I might have been without water for 3 weeks.

My total cost for the new tank was $4000, installed