Sense Home 2025.1

Reviews

5 ★, on 2021-06-15
Easy to use and it provides a ton of useful information on my home's energy usage. Matches up with my electric bill within a dollar or two. Shows instant results from an appliance turning on or off. App works as advertised about 95% of the time. Device detection isn't perfect but fairly accurate and you can update or merge any incorrect devices. Love it.

2 ★, on 2021-05-19
I got this for free with my solar installation. It did what I wanted, which is tell me how much power I'm feeding the grid, how much power the house is using, and some nice cumulative statistics. So I'm happy because that's all I was expecting. The device detection is kinda neat, but it doesn't work very well. It can't differentiate between my stove and my toaster, for instance, which is weird, since my stove is 240V and my toaster is 120V and it monitors both poles... so that should have been an easy one for it. It also detected one pole of my water heater as a water heater and the other pole as "Heat 4", despite the fact that they always use the same amount of energy and come on and off together - I had to manually merge them... but it was extra strange because it detected it correctly, together, at first, and then later detected a "new device", which was the other pole, and pulled that pole out of the device it originally detected correctly. What? It's very frustrating that you can't "teach" it by telling it you're going to turn something on and off, and telling it what it is. It takes some random amount of time to learn things that you have no control over, and it's not very good at it. The "energy hog" tutorial is silly... anyone who's had a power meter and some curiosity and pays any attention to what kind of light bulbs they have already knows everything you learn in that tutorial. Machine learning is neat, but this app really points out the shortcomings! This part of the app doesn't feel "finished", and though I've had fun geeking out with it, the combined lack of accuracy with lack of manual control makes it extremely frustrating for a somewhat knowledgeable geek such as me, and I would imagine very frustrating indeed for the average non-geeky layperson. Having written a few apps myself, I would not have let this out of alpha with this poor of a detection algorithm. I would have let a lot more people train this machine learning algorithm manually before releasing this as a public beta, gotten more data, and THEN released it. When a machine-learning algorithm can't detect patterns that I can clearly see with my own eyes... well, it's not very useful. On top of all of that, the app crashes constantly, and I have to close it manually and open it again to get it to update. This happens in the browser too. All in all, I'd say this is an app that has a LOT of promise, but should not have been released to the public yet, or at least not the device detection part. As far as utility to the consumer, for figuring out how much power individual devices use, it's not very useful either, for a number of reasons. Because of the power signature detection algorithm it clearly uses, different components of a device get detected as different devices, and it's impossible to force it to detect anything, so one often misses large portions of the actual power usage of an appliance. For instance, my fridge, like many modern fridges, has two motors - one for the freezer and one for the refrigerator portion, and several heating elements for the frost-free feature, and also some light bulbs and a motor for the ice-cube maker and a motor for the ice cube dispenser screw (the last two won't use significant energy, so so what, but my points stands). Sense detects some of these and not others. So far it has detected my fridge motor but not my freezer one, and none of the other motors or heating elements - they are all in "other", so when I look at how much power my "Fridge" is using, it's way lower than it really is. It would be MUCH more accurate for me to just plug a power meter inline with my fridge plug for a day or two. Similar things are true about my coffee maker, which has a pump, a heating element, a grinding motor, and a servo motor or two. The app really isn't clear with you that all of these things are separate and gives you a false sense of having detected the power usage of an appliance. I'm curious to see if what they're trying to do is even possible. It's a very neat idea. I look forward to future improvements.

2 ★, on 2021-05-02
I've had sense for a while now, and it is alright. Doesn't learn very well, and it could be SO MUCH BETTER. Please let us manually define devices from the realtime usage timeline. Its a win-win scenario, you get more data to feed the ML and we get more accurate, granular reporting. I'm hoping this, and many other things, are added as enhancements. Is there anywhere I can go to see your enhancement development schedule and put forth ideas/submissions?

1 ★, on 2021-04-27
Identifies multiple "heating" loads as the same load. For example: my toaster and rice cooker both get identified as "toaster" by sense and there's no way to separate them. Perhaps because their power usage signature is similar? Overall billing cycle power reading is anywhere between 10-30% off from from the utility company reports. Daily, weekly, monthly, and per billing cycle $ usage goal tracking is broken. Customer support turnaround time is higher than average.

5 ★, on 2021-06-26
Sense helped me prove my electric company didn't install a net meter! Easily worth the cost!!!!

3 ★, on 2021-05-05
Product is ok. If you like monitoring it's great. If you want the "smart" features of it's ML/AI it mostly doesn't work. Tried to get support to improve it over the last 2.5 years but seems they are very limited on making it better. Recognized only part of the signature for products and those are mostly motors. After all this time and them telling me to delete the item to "get more samples" still hardly recognizes anything accurately. Not even a simple recirculating pump or light bulb.