What Sense is
Sense is a mobile app that helps you simply manage your home energy use directly from your phone. It uses machine learning to read your home’s electrical current, and analyzes each appliance’s unique electrical signature, giving you a real-time picture of your home’s energy usage.
While your electric bill shows how much energy your household uses over a period of time, Sense helps you find ways to save money and reduce your carbon footprint. With personalized insights and easy-to-use tools, you'll be able to keep track of where your energy is going and become more energy efficient.
How Sense works
You might be eligible to use Sense if you’ve recently had a new Smart Meter installed in your home and were told by your electricity provider that your smart meter is capable of running the Sense Home app. When you set up your Sense system, you establish a 3-way communication among three key players in your electrical setup:
- You use a phone or tablet to create an account in the Sense Home app and begin to review your home’s data from your mobile device or the Web app.
- You use your mobile device to link your utility company’s electric account to Sense. Sense’s account verification process follows industry standard practices that are secure and familiar.
- You then connect your Sense-enabled meter to your home’s Wi-Fi.
Real time information
As soon as your setup with Sense is complete, the Power Meter in your Sense Home app shows how many watts* are being used at minute, hour, day, week and month intervals, and it provides a historical record over time. If you turn a major appliance on or off, you are likely to see an instant impact on total wattage in use.
*TIP: You may want to review How do watts become kiloWatt (kWh) hours on my bill?
Device detection
Over time, as Sense learns about your home’s total usage, it begins to isolate the signatures of individual devices as they turn on and off and are used repeatedly. Sense reports this identification to you as a hypothesis, then relies on your knowledge of your home to help it properly name each device. This process lets you isolate the energy used by individual devices and make decisions on usage.
Savings
As you begin to see how much energy individual devices use, you can make decisions to save money and to use energy wisely.
- You may decide to use some devices when energy rates are lower than at peak periods.
- You may postpone the use of some devices when carbon intensity is high.
- You might decide to invest in more efficient energy devices such as LED bulbs or smarter appliances. Sense provides the data that helps you track how much you save.
Why does my electricity provider want me to use Sense?
Many electricity providers offer a range of programs and services to help customers reduce their energy consumption and shift usage to lower cost times of day. Sense is a powerful tool to help you identify choices you can make to save electricity throughout your home now and all year, as seasons - and usage - change.
For more information, please see this blog: Next-Gen Smart Meters Have Arrived. Why That's a Good Thing