The monitor is a pretty expensive piece of technology and add another $50 if you want to track solar output as well. Not to mention it installs inside your electrical panel so you will probably need to hire an electrician to get it installed.
I had the monitor installed in mid-July. It takes a couple days to start tracking your energy and then a another week or so before it starts finding devices. My home is a bit unique in that my mother lives with me in an in-law apartment which means I have two stoves, refrigerators. ovens, toasters, microwaves and washers and dryers. Not to mention two AC compressors which are my major energy users. My main goal in purchasing the device was to get a handle on where I am using electricity but also as I tech geek I just think the technology is cool and fun to plat with.
So after about a week of having the device installed it started finding devices. The "device discovery" process is not an exact science. Usually when it finds a device it will tell you it found a motor or a heating device and a confidence level. You need to go around your house and turn those devices on and off and confirm what it found then you can rename the device and provide more information to help sense. Sense did a pretty good job identifying my devices properly. It did find what it thought was three different vacuums none of which were vacuums that I own. I think some of the oddities that I saw were due to a remodeling project I had going on in my house, so Sense found a bunch of power tools that aren't really part of my home.
So after about months of discovery Sense has found about 26 devices. It has found most of my major appliances. It will not yet find any LED light bulbs that you have but it did find the incandescent bulbs in my refrigerator. It found my gas dryer, but not my washer yet. It also has not found any of the TVs in my house all of which are LED. Device discovery has slowed down over the past few weeks but I assume it will find a few more devices once the weather get cooler and I start needing to heat my home.
One interesting data point that sense provides is your "always on" or phantom power. This is the electricity used by devices like your tv, cable box, routers, phone chargers or any other devices that use a small amount of power but are always on. My always on number is under 250 watts which I think is pretty good considering the number of smart home products I have. This is probably and area that I can take a closer look at and save a little money by unplugging some of those always on devices while I am not using them.
The device is definitly a work in progess. I have had much better luck with device discovery than most. A friend installed the device a month or two before I did has less than 10 devices detected. In theory though as more people use the device the machine learning models should get better. I do have a concern about what happens if Sense goes under. Since all of the processing is done on teh cloud, if the company goes away so does all of my data and monitoring. But I guess that is a risk we take as early adopters of technology
