REVIEW: The Sense Energy Monitor—Track Electricity Usage in Real Time and Save Money—is it worth it?

Maximize Your Home’s Energy Efficiency with the Sense Home Energy Monitor

If your home uses a lot of electricity, consider energy monitors like the Sense Home Energy Monitor. This smart device attaches to the wires inside your circuit breaker panel and immediately starts tracking and identifying the power used by your appliances and devices. The Sense monitor helps you track energy use, identify problems, and adjust your usage to save money over time. When paired with a home solar system, Sense lets you track energy production and consumption in real-time, showing how solar energy offsets your usage. Whether or not you have solar panels, the Sense Home Energy Monitor provides valuable insights to help you manage your energy use more effectively.

How the Sense Home Energy Monitor Works

The Sense energy monitor is a small device installed inside your home’s electrical panel. While you can install it yourself, hiring a licensed electrician is recommended. The monitor detects the electrical current from your utility company flowing into your home. If you have solar panels, it includes an additional port for detector clamps to monitor energy from your solar inverter. In a Sense-plus-solar setup, the white clamps detect the power generated by your solar panels. Once installed, the Sense monitor begins measuring the current flowing through your wires, providing real-time data on your energy usage.

How Using Sense Saves Money

Simply monitoring your energy use with Sense won’t directly save you money, but it can help you identify where you’re using too much power. For example, it can show how much energy your appliances use and reveal “vampire power” wastage, which occurs when devices consume power even when turned off.

• Identify Malfunctioning Appliances: Sense can alert you when an appliance malfunctions and draws power even when it’s off. This lets you fix or replace the appliance, saving on energy costs.
• Reminders to Turn Off Devices: Sense can remind you to turn off devices that are no longer needed, like a sump pump or workshop tools, helping reduce unnecessary energy use.
• Time-of-Use (TOU) Billing: If you have a TOU energy plan, where electricity costs more during peak times, Sense can help you save money. You can set up “rate zones” in the Sense app to match your TOU plan. The app will alert you when high-cost periods start and end, helping you shift your energy use to cheaper times.
• Detailed Energy Reports: Sense provides detailed reports on your energy usage, helping you understand your consumption patterns. You can see which appliances use the most energy and when, allowing you to make informed decisions about your energy use.
• Real-Time Alerts: Sense can send real-time alerts to your phone about unusual energy spikes or continuous high usage, helping you address issues immediately and prevent high energy bills.

How Sense Identifies Energy Use and Detects Appliances

Sense detects energy use by recognizing the unique power patterns of each appliance in your home. When an appliance turns on or off, it uses power in a specific way. Sense’s creators have used machine learning to train the monitor to recognize these unique “electronic signatures.”

After you install the Sense monitor, it starts recording the power used in your home. As different appliances turn on and off, Sense identifies them based on their unique power patterns. This process can take some time, and some users have had to repeatedly turn appliances off and on for Sense to recognize them. However, Sense’s machine learning improves over time, making it more accurate.

How Sense Works with Solar Power

Sense can also detect the amount of energy your solar panels generate in real time. The Sense app for Android, iOS, and the web shows this data in a fun “bubble” display, making it easy to see which appliances are drawing power and how much solar energy you are generating. Sense provides daily, weekly, or monthly energy usage profiles over time. This helps you understand your energy consumption patterns and adjust to save money.

Advantages of Sense Over Other Solar Monitoring

Many solar panel owners prefer Sense to track solar production because it provides real-time updates, whereas other solutions, like the Enphase app, only update every 15 minutes. With Sense, you can see how much electricity your solar panels produce and how much your appliances use, so you’ll know if your appliances consume more or less power than your panels generate.

Is Sense the Best Choice for Solar Owners?

Contact us to install Sense, an excellent choice for solar owners who want detailed information about their energy use. Sense tracks how much electricity your devices consume and helps identify energy issues. If you have solar panels, it shows your energy production in real-time and integrates with smart home systems to manage energy and lower your electric bill. Even if your solar panels lack monitoring software, Sense provides valuable insights. While it might not be the cheapest option for those not dealing with major electrical issues, it helps you understand your energy use better. It includes features that improve over time, such as tracking time-of-use rates to avoid high energy costs. We offer Sense installation to automatically measure and calculate all your home’s energy use through the Sense App for a $250 fee, although this service is not widely advertised.