Sense

I bought a sense unit a couple of years ago for my new, modern high tech house. I was excited by what the product apparently offered: the ability to monitor my power use in real time to give me insight into how much electricity was being used by all of the devices in my house. Apparently the way it was supposed to work was that Sense uses machine learning to "discover" all of the electrical devices in your house on its own using unique signatures of power pulsing through your mains. The device itself and the app seemed slickly designed. In addition to the cost of the Sense device I had to pay an electrician to come and install the device inside my electrical panel. So I was more than $450 invested in this thing as it was turned on. But what I began to learn over time was that the machine learning was incredibly slow and imperfect. After many months of use it never "found" more than 2/5 of the devices in my house that were using electricity. It had difficultly with devices that used different amounts of power for instance a coffee maker that would grind and brew coffee in different stages, or my gas fired heating system that used different amounts of power to generate hot water for the taps, the floor heat, or simply to recirculate water through my house. It always thought the heating system was three or four different devices. In some cases, it would find an electric kettle or a toaster which I would then dutifully label in the app with the name and model number of the device. But then when I'd look at the app a few weeks later that device would be forgotten. Or it would be mixed up with something else. I wasted heaps of time going back and forth with their customer service, resetting the device, reinstalling the app, trying this tweak or that. But nothing worked. At length they finally admitted that the Sense device "just did not work with all houses" something that they really should have disclosed up front. As there was no way to program devices or fixtures yourself, you had to wait until the Sense device discovered the device on its own. But after years of use it even failed to find major appliances (like dishwashers and laundry machines) that were on their own circuits. The Sense unit simply did not work as it was advertised and what I realized over time was that I was simply a pawn, paying money for a device that would feed them free data that they could use to improve something that simply was not ready for market. I regret giving Sense my money for a device whose capabilities were misrepresented. Purchasing the Sense unit was a waste of time and money. Don't get conned the way I was.