Over time, the Sense Home app will identify many electrical appliances in typical homes by noting on/off events and learning the “signatures” of individual appliances or devices among the electrical traffic in your home.
Within a few minutes of your Sense system being activated, the power meter in the app will begin to record your home’s power consumption. You can see energy your home consumes by turning devices on and off and watching the power meter in real time. Just be aware that low-wattage electronics like computers, smart devices, and game consoles can be especially tough to track.
Though the device detection process takes some time – days and weeks – it is enhanced by your collaboration in helping Sense name and identify your home’s specific devices. Your collaboration begins almost instantly. As you create your account, the Sense system asks you to answer a few questions about major appliances that may be in your home. Based on your answers, Sense will promptly share valuable information about those appliances as it begins to learn about your home’s usage.
As the Sense system returns a hypothesis for each signature it identifies, you will want to continue to collaborate by helping Sense name each device or, if Sense has identified a component within a complex device, to ask Sense to merge components. For example, a simple clothes dryer has at least one motor, one heating element, and one light. Sense can identify each of these components, but most people simply wish to track all of them as “clothes dryer” and so they instruct Sense to merge these elements under that name.
To understand all of this better, please visit this page describing Machine Learning, the technology that is the essence of your Sense system (here).
As Sense accumulates data from more and more homes, the performance and coverage of our device detection will continue to improve. In the meantime, if a particular device proves challenging, many of our users have had great success tracking such loads via our smart plug integration.
Note: If your Sense system was installed in your electrical panel, you may also be able to use direct circuit monitoring for especially large (240v) devices.
Many factors contribute to the Sense system’s ability to differentiate an individual device within the overall traffic of a home’s electrical use. Because of this, Sense is unlikely to identify each device in your home.