Today, we’re very excited to announce our newest feature: Carbon Intensity. This mobile-only release is available on iOS v38.0 build 1561 & Android v38.0 build 1244.
Our goal with this feature is to help users understand the carbon impact of their home’s energy use and see when they can shift large loads to reduce carbon impact. To that end, we’ve added grid carbon data from a third-party provider (Carbonara) into the Sense app. Sense CEO Mike Phillips and Wenbo Shi (co-founder and CEO of Singularity, creator of Carbonara) spoke to several Beta users in a video you can find here: https://youtu.be/pvCwSfQQuII
How to access
You can access the feature via the new “Carbon” card on the Dashboard screen. This feature lets you:
- View the real-time and historical carbon intensity of your home’s energy use.
- See a 24hr carbon intensity forecast, which helps you know when you can shift large loads to low-impact times and reduce your home’s carbon impact.
- See a breakdown of the fuel sources used to generate electricity for your grid region. (e.g. coal, natural gas, wind, solar, etc.)
What is carbon intensity?
Carbon Intensity measures the number of pounds of carbon dioxide that it takes to make a unit of electricity (kWh). Depending on your geographic region, your electricity’s carbon intensity may be highly variable or relatively flat. To learn more, check out "What is Carbon Intensity."
A few notes
- You’ll need to input your zip code to access this feature. If you haven’t added your zip, you’ll be prompted to do so on the Carbon Intensity screen.
- For this beta, the new Your Avg CI datapoint will take 24-48 hours to be calculated. It will show up automatically once it’s available.
- We are using a third-party data provider for the carbon and fuel mix data. Unfortunately, we do not have the full United States covered, so if you live outside of a covered region this feature will not be available. We would like to expand our geographic coverage in the future. You can see the covered areas below:
Dedicated Circuit/Standby Threshold update
We’ve issued a small adjustment to the Dedicated Circuit feature. Due to low-level noise inherent to CT sensors, Dedicated Circuit devices could occasionally trigger errant on/off/standby events. We’ve fine-tuned the Standby feature for Dedicated Circuit devices to better account for this noise. The minimum allowable Standby threshold for these devices has been updated to 3W. For any users (a very small amount) who had set a Standby threshold to below 3W, we have updated your Standby threshold to 3W for any Dedicated Circuit devices. This does not apply to Smart Plug devices with Standby thresholds.