Sense energy monitor teardown

Will Sense energy monitor teardown give idea about saving electricity cost? Can it track electricity usage? Sense energy monitor has the potential to save you money month after month through lower electricity bills, and so it should. It’s difficult to justify the $299 price tag otherwise. Track how much electricity you’re using, what time your kids got home, or when someone leaves the basement light on. Sense identifies patterns in your energy use to help your family be more efficient, informed, and secure. Sense saves you energy and money by providing insight into your home’s energy use and activity. Sense energy monitor teardown will reveal more.

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Pros & Cons – Sense energy monitor

PROS
-It is 99.5% accurate for what my utility company is measuring and billing me for, so it is very accurate
-Detects amperage and voltage on each 120V leg (hidden in the app menu; go to: Settings->My Home -> Sense Monitor), which is great when you need to see if one leg of your panel has more usage or voltage issues.
-Does data collection about once a second
– Can quickly identify resistance loads (space heater, toaster, etc) and induction motors (older furnaces, older pool pumps, exhaust fans) within a week or so if used regularly. Most of these items were identified correctly but dont always get detected between cycles
-Devices with single speed compressors take a little longer to identify but eventually get identified correctly (fridges, traditional AC unit, dehumidifier)

CONS
-Install is not for the average homeowner (but not much can be done about that from the Manufacturer’s prospective). Having a pro install the component will be around $100 but there is not very good documentation to give a pro for install. The manufacturer has no real documentation meant for professional electricians (no electrical diagrams or requirements), so a pro who is not familiar with the product may struggle to get it wired into the panel quickly without going to the support website or calling technical support.
-For those with a panel with no room to add a new 2 pole breaker, your electrician will have to make room by adding at least 2 tandem breakers (at an additional cost)
-WiFi antenna extension cable needs to be longer. Installing the sense inside a metal electrical panel is dooming the device to have a poor WiFi signal and the short extension cable for the WiFi antenna is not very long, which made it a challenge to find a way to get the antenna mounted outside my flush mounted panel
– Device discoveries are usually “guesses” that require the user to verify it but many of the guesses were not accurate for me. The guesses have become more wild over time (ex. a 10 watt load had a 88% chance of being a clothes dryer even though my clothes dryer wasn’t on at all).
-Device will use a decent amount of network bandwidth, especially when it is first started because it is “phoning home” to help identify usage patterns. (for those who have metered internet, especially Satellite Internet or those who use cellular data as the only means for internet).
-Will not detect variable speed motors (new pool pumps, modern HVAC equipment, HE washing machines)
– Will not detect lights on dimmers
-Struggles to find computers (I have a high performance desktop PC that stays on 24/7 and it has not been found in 3 months despite using the same amount of energy. My home office equipment in particular uses about 160KWH/month (but I know that thanks to the Kill-A-Watt, not the Sense monitor).

Sense energy monitor video teardown

Design

The Sense system consists of a brick-shaped monitor box, a Wi-Fi antenna, two current sensors, a power cable, an installation guide, and a mounting kit. The monitor is bright red and measures 5.5 by 2.5 by 1.7 inches (HWD). It has ports for plugging in the antenna, current sensors, and power cable, and is equipped with a 1GHz ARM processor as well as 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless radios.

The current sensors are similar to the ones you get with Eyedro Business Electricity Monitor ; they each have a circular electromagnetic transformer that you attach to your main power lines and a 46-inch cord that connects to the monitor. The monitor works with Android and iOS mobile devices, and a Web-based app is on the way.

Cash & Antenna

The case is very well built from high density plastic, however it is clipped together neatly and easy to take off without permanent damage. The wifi antenna is screwed on with a neat water sealed connector. The power/voltage and current sampler connectors are Molex Microfit and Nanofit respectively.

Processor

The main CPU is a Linux compatible AM3352 CPU from TI. It does not have a PRU co-processor like the one used on the BeagleBone, hence the need for a CPLD to perform some of the real-time computation required.

Interior

Inside this very nice exterior are a couple of very dense sandwiched PCB’s. One is Green, almost a generic power supply board, but with additional function to sample the split phase AC in the North American grid. The other is a black board where the magic happens. It is essentially a beaglebone wireless with a custom energy monitor system put together using high-speed ADC’s and a CPLD

it is composed of x2 high sample rate ADC’s (14bit 2MSPS) and an Altera Max V 64pin CPLD. I assume the cells inside the CPLD perform the reading from the ADC’s and multiplication/accumulation to compute energy usage, then transmit computation results to the TI CPU.

How to install sense energy monitor?

It is recommended that you have a qualified electrician install the Sense monitor, which means you may have to shell out another $50-$100. It is also requires an unused circuit breaker. For this review I performed the installation myself (under the guidance of a licensed electrician) using the included installation guide. First, I turned off the main breaker on my electrical panel and removed the panel cover. I had plenty of room to place the monitor on the bottom of the panel box, but if your panel is too crowded you can use the included kit to mount it on a wall outside of the enclosure.

Next, I installed the antenna on the outside of the panel box by snaking the cable through a knockout on the box and attaching the antenna to the box using the included insert. I connected the power, sensor, and antenna cables to the monitor, and clamped the sensors to the power main lines (keeping in mind that the main lines are always live). Finally, I connected the power cable to an open breaker by attaching the red and black wire directly to the breaker and the white wire to the neutral terminal. I replaced the panel cover, switched on the main breaker, and waited several seconds for a chime, signaling a successful installation. I downloaded the iOS app, created an account, and connected the monitor to my Wi-Fi network.

Sense energy monitor performance teardown

The monitor went right to work trying to figure out what devices were drawing power. I started out with a big Unknown bubble, but the following day it was joined by a fairly large Always On bubble. Always On refers to devices that are always drawing power such as TVs, routers, DVRs, set-top boxes, and anything that uses a standby mode, while Unknown devices have yet to be identified.

Over time, the Sense will try to learn the identity of each device and give it its own bubble, and as it does, the Unkown bubble begins to shrink. Over the course of a week or two I received email messages informing me that Sense had identified another device, and sure enough there were new bubbles on the app. During this time it identified several refrigerators (I have four), my microwave oven, my pool filter pump, all of my lights, the dishwasher, and the washing machine. However, it never was able to identify certain devices that are used regularly such as the clothes dryer, the toaster oven, the hair dryer, and the coffee maker. Fortunately, a bubble appears when you run an unknown device, at which point you can tap it, edit its name, and add it to the event timeline. Over time I was able to identify every device that the monitor missed.

The Sense did an awesome job of reporting power usage in real time. Within seconds of turning on my microwave oven a bubble appeared, accompanied by a popping sound, alerting me that the device was on and how much power it was drawing. When it was turned off again the event was listed below with a brief description of the activity (how long it was on). I went around the house turning things on and off and the monitor immediately responded every time. It was interesting (and a bit shocking) to watch the total wattage numbers rise whenever my son arrived home from school to begin his afternoon routine of Xbox, making snacks, and turning on every light in the house. Fortunately my house is almost entirely connected, so I can turn most things off from my phone.

Sense energy monitor customer teardown

Only detect 20% of household load
After 4 months the Sense monitor has detected about 20% of my household load and that’s been true for about 3 months now. Nothing new is being learned. This is helpfull in determining our household energy use, but far from as useful as I’d like. I have taken to using a Kill-a-Watt meter and a clamp-on ammeter to measure the devices that Sense is not detecting.
If one is comfortable working inside a breaker box the device is simple to install. Connect to power, hang the antenna outside the box and go. Easy. If not, you’ll need to pay someone to do the install.
The smartphone app is good, but lacks some functionality that would be very helpful. For example: The Sense will sometimes detect a single physical device as multiple electrical devices, which requires human intervention to “merge;” the app could offer some hints, based on timing correlation, about which devices might be related. Also, there needs to be some way to give some hints/training to the Sense (yes, I know, I know, Machine Learning doesn’t work that way. Blah blah blah. It needs to be there.) Also, the app should tie in better with other measuring devices. There is support for IFTTT, which is, hate to keep saying this, not very useful. There are other smart measuring products out there and the Sense app could integrate with some of those to provide a fuller energy-use picture.
Customer support is responsive and polite. Very nice people. There’s not much they can do about the limitations of product, but they are quite polite and responsive.
So…. I rate this product 3 stars because I’m hopeful that it will improve.
By Amazon Reviewer

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Sense energy monitor video teardown