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Solar Sustainable Home

Sense Flex Home Energy Monitor Review – Does It Work?

JG Wall
6 Comments
June 28, 2021
5 Mins read

After owning it for several months, I wanted to share my Sense Flex Home Energy Monitor Review.

Opening the electric bill every month became a painful chore. Regardless of what I did, which included keeping unnecessary lights turned off, shades closed in summer, intelligent thermostats, still it seemed my electricity was through the roof.

Consequently, that did not yield the results I was hoping for concerning savings.  I did some quick research on the internet and became aware of an innovative electronic gadget. Most of my research still left me wondering Does Sense Energy Monitor Work?

They say knowledge is power, and I was looking to acquire more knowledge on the source that uses so much power in my home. That search leads me to the Sense Energy Monitor.

What is it?

Sense Home Energy Monitor gives you real-time information regarding your electrical consumption.  Sense monitoring takes advantage of the fact that every electrical device has its unique signature.

When you turn on an electrical device in your home, the device will capture the signature then Sense will analyze and compares it against a database. I know it’s a simplistic overview, but it is more complex than it sounds. False or duplicate identification of devices does occur and will be annoying at the beginning.

The process to analyze the unique signature is not a fast process. Three days before, the app identified its first appliance, the refrigerator. Then, slowly more loads came into the app.

Sense Monitor App allows you to confirm the detected electric load based on the probability it has the right one.

The Sense Energy Monitor will display that information using interactive bubbles in an app.  In addition, one can see the wattage your whole home is drawing from the grid in real-time. Sense Monitor offers CT a separate addon or part of their Sense Flex package to monitor solar production. I added solar after the initial purchase, but it was easy to add to my existing unit.

Install to Electric Breaker Panel

I am not an electrician but installing Sense requires the removal of the breaker panel cover. The entire household wiring runs to the individual breaker for the dryer, water heater, and lights with the panel off.

Things To Consider Before Buying A Sense Energy Monitor
Sense Box

I have a healthy respect for electricity. If you do not know the difference between a Phillips or flat-head screwdriver, get some help. It is not a difficult task for most DIY’ers.

The instructions are straightforward, and support from Sense is excellent from my experience. The one thing I’ve read is to make sure the CT clamps fit securely around main power leads from utility connect.

It can get cramped in some breaker panels. Also, the Sense capture box and CTs installs on the main breaker panel, not sub-panels downstream.  All data gets transmitted via WIFI, so the main breaker panel needs a decent signal from the wireless router.

Detecting Home Electrical Consumption

Once I had the app downloaded on my phone and created a free account, I was good to go. Sense has what I call a bake in time before identifying loads from the grid. The process took at least 4-5 days before notifications showed on the app. Once an electrical load is detected, you will receive information on your phone. For example, Sense has detected a dryer.  You confirm the event, and the load will show up in-app.

In some cases, it was spot on in detection. My wife got annoyed with me asking her if she turned a light on or ran the dishwasher. It is all part of the process to see the different loads of electricity consumed.

The detection is OK. But not great. Sometimes. It would detect but then never show up again. The summary will assess how much each appliance uses for electricity. There’s also a real-time graph that will show your current energy usage.

Sense Home Energy Monitor image of app for visual picture
Sense Home Energy Monitor image of the app

How To Use This Data to Trim Electric Consumption

Now that you have all this data. How can it help you save on electricity? You can combine the Sense home monitoring with smart plugs from Wemo and Kasa. The Sense Energy Monitor will essentially speed up identifying the load source for the outlet plug.

I noticed a spike of 500 watts every 30 minutes all day. With the help of Sense, I soon realized my water cooler’s hot water switch was on. Over 24 hours, it was almost 10 kwh a day.

Another example includes phantom loads such as TV, chargers, nightlights, and other electronics. With Sense monitoring and smart plugs, I can get an idea of energy consumption.

In the smart plug app, it’s possible to schedule these plugs off when not used. I have a smart plug on the big screen TV to turn off overnight and most of the day.

It may not seem like a lot, but I can add up over months and years to keep a status light-lit. If your TVs have an energy savings mode, consider using it.

Another energy hog I found using Sense was my 55-gallon electric water heater. It was getting old and combined with our hard water, it became highly inefficient.

I could replace the unit with an efficient Energy Star rated model before ultimately leaving us without hot water.

Sense Flex Home Energy Monitor

Our Pick With Solar
Sense Flex Home Energy Monitor Sense Flex Home Energy Monitor
$349.00
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Here is a list of the pros and cons of the Sense Monitoring system based on my real-world usage.

Pros-

  • Valuable insight into electrical usage in the home
  • Easy install for DIY or professional
  • Free data storage via an app from Sense Energy Monitor
  • Keep tabs on critical loads such as sump or well pumps, fridges, or heaters.

Cons-

  • High upfront cost
  • Machine learning is not consistently accurate.
  • Identifying household loads takes patients and time.
  • It uses “always on” as a catch-all for loads that Sense can’t identify.

Wrap Up

Is Sense Home Energy Monitor worth the money? In my case, yes, for a couple of reasons. Sense provides helpful insight into my home’s energy consumption.

I was able to take tangible actions to curb usage and verify via my electric bill’s usage comparisons to years past. In addition, I caught a faulty water heater in time before going out.

 

Sense Flex Home Energy Monitor Review - Does It Work?
electric bill high save electricity Sense Energy Monitor
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Written by

JG Wall

Jim and his wife have a long history of land stewardship. In 2017, they converted their acreage from agricultural use to wildlife conservation activities after realizing that preserving open space and water quality was important. Outside of maintaining their property, Jim is an Amateur Radio operator licensed by the FCC. He also enjoys traveling, reading, writing, and spending time with his family in the outdoors.

6 Comments
  1. Christine

    June 29, 2021 8:34 pm

    It isn’t always easy to keep the electricity bill down. Sometimes we use electrical appliances and leave them running and then when we get the bill we don’t remember what we did to get such a high bill …

    Sense looks like a great program to use. Getting notifications sent to your phone whenever an electrical appliance is being used gives you more control especially if you have teenage kids who may leave things running all day long 😉 

    1. Jim

      June 30, 2021 1:47 am

      Thank you for your comments. That is so true but I must admit I’ve been known to leave a light on myself. It can add up over time and Sense can help you change those habits to save money.

  2. Melony

    July 1, 2021 2:10 am

    This is a very interesting and informative article. However, I do not believe the home sense monitor gauge would be a necessary device for me  and others in my country. A few years ago  the company that provides household  electricity installed what they called ‘smart’ meters in the homes. These meters carried a pamphlet  with instructions on how to read  the meters. In addition the meters are also read   from within the  company itself Possibly this home sense monitor gauge would best suite those large corporations or business which need to keep a close watch on their electrical consumption each month  especially considering the cost of the instrument. 

    1. Jim

      July 1, 2021 9:55 pm

      Hello Melony,

      Thank you for sharing, and you are correct that the Sense Home energy monitor may not make sense (no pun intended) for everyone’s needs. The smart meter issued by our COOP in the states makes available the whole home’s overall electricity usage via an app for smartphones; it even shows me our home hourly usage. Our smart meter is limited, though, and does not drill down to individual loads in your home. If, for instance, my water heater is showing in Sense using a significant amount of electricity during a 24 hour period. That may indicate an element going bad, or the temperature could be adjusted down, etc. I even had a situation where the COOP changed out my smart meter because of a significant difference between Sense usage totals and the smart meter usage.

  3. Andy

    August 30, 2021 5:26 pm

    Hi. What an amazing system. We get some basic benchmarking data from our electrical supplier. With every energy bill, they tell us how our consumption compares with the average house in our area and with the most energy-efficient house in our area. Usually, we are exactly midway between the two. So we are better than average but not as good as we could be. I am very impressed with the intelligence of the Sense energy monitoring system. I am curious though. When you consider the complexity of the triggers it is using to detect devices, is all that computing going on inside that small device or is the data crunched in some central database in the cloud somewhere? Thanks, Andy

    1. Jim

      August 31, 2021 4:45 am

      Hi Andy,
      It’ my understanding the unique signature that an electrical device omits is compared to a database that resides offsite and is not in the device. Since March, I’ve had my unit running, and Sense Energy Monitor has identified maybe 3/4 of the major devices using electricity such as HVAC, Water Heater, electric oven, etc. Sense Energy can also detect motor stalls which may indicate faulty electric motors. I’m working on a blog post where Sense alerted me on a potential disaster on my water heater that leaked near the heating element, creating a fire hazard. The Sense Energy Monitor allowed me to pinpoint the source.
      Thank you for the comments,
      Jim

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