Sense electricity monitoring gets new superpowers, exclusive Co-founder interview and Product Manager live demonstration
With some persistence, forum participation, and a bit of luck, TinkerTry somehow landed a scoop on some new features and capabilities that Sense is planning to introduce in 2021, straight from Sense! Special thanks to the Director of Communications, I was given the opportunity to chat with both Christopher and Emory, pictured at right.
This is not a sponsored post, but Sense did ship me 3 accessory items worth under $100 in total, as I've been working with Sense on ways to reliably monitor EVs and servers.
This chance at an impromptu interview was quite an honor, we had initially planned to just discuss some of the existing product questions I had. They handled those with ease, so I politely asked if it would be ok to record a discussion about what is coming up next at Sense. To my suprise, the answer was yes. This was an unscripted conversation.
I'm super eager to finally get to share this video below with you, and I'd love to hear what you think about these new features, Just drop a comment below this article, or below the video.
New Features
Currently in Sense Labs (beta):
- Motor Stalls
- Power Quality
- AC Energy Comparison
- Floating Neutral
I'm looking forward seeing these new features in action, once deployed via firmware and software updates.
What's really cool here is that Sense has plans to happen to resolve some pain points I've actually experienced in my 25 year old home. One example was soon after moving into one of a row of 10 new houses in 1995. A couple of years into ownership, and we decided it was time for central air conditioning, which also meant upgrading from a 100 amp to 200 amp service panel. Soon enough, our voltage in our neighborhood began to sag, especially during the heat of summer. Using my UPS's logging feature, after years of back and forth, I convinced my power company to come and have a look at voltage in my neightborhood, and sure enough, they replaced a transformer and the issues vanished. Go figure. Any kidn of documentation about Power Quality sounds good to me!
Video
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Notes
I bought my sense in July of 2018, and installed it promptly. I admit to have some challenges with device detection of certain devices, which has part of the reason I've not focused on getting a full review out just yet. So I reached out to Sense support recently, figuring we could work on a retrofit to my existing configuration to incorporate not just 200 amp panel monitoring, but also separate monitoring of the 100 amp subpanel in my garage. An electrician added this subpanel in early 2019 to handle charging our 2 Tesla Model 3 EVs, one at 32 amps, the other at 40 amps, each with its own 50 amp circuit breaker. This poses a bit of a challenge, and Sense has kindly offered to work with me by shipping me extra Flex Sensors at no charge.
There are other ways to go about monitoring Tesla charging at home, including the Tesla API that allows apps like TeslaFi to see statistics, and maybe some day via the Tesla Wall Connector (Gen 3 with WiFi).
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Entire product line at:
Right here at TinkerTry, if you're interested in my EV charging in my garage, you can read more and see more details of EV charging, along with pics of my 200 amp panel.
See also at TinkerTry
- All articles about Efficiency
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