How To Install the Sense Home Energy Monitor & 2022 Coupon Code Discount!

hey there thanks for stopping by if you guys are subscribed to this channel I have a really good deal on the sense home energy monitor if you use a link at the top of the description you'll be able to get a discount on your unit it also just helps to support the channel a little bit so I'd really appreciate if you use that link it'll help you up and it'll help me out as well now let's get into the installation of the sense home energy monitor these are the parts that are included with it this right here is the sense energy monitor itself along with the mounting bracket that you will likely not need to use here is the connector that is for the extension of the antenna which you're going to use so that your sense energy monitor can connect to Wi-Fi and then these are the power cables which are going to allow the monitor to keep track of what the current voltage of your power supply is these are your two amp meters are going to clamp around your two main wires coming in to the top of your panel and then that will obviously tell you how much power you're drawing any given time now in addition to that you're going to need to obtain a breaker that is the correct one for whatever brand panel that you have if you don't have enough space in your panel will talk about breakers a little bit more here in a few minutes and I'll explain a couple of other options that you have this device is going to be installed in the main panel of your house or whichever panel is first on your property so if you have a panel that is in a building that is before your house you could actually install this upstream of a beat of this panel and that would cover any panel that is technically downstream of that location so wherever the first panel is after the electrical meter that's going to be the best place to put it okay so let's go ahead and open the panel up and I'll show you what we're going to be looking at so right now the panel is still live I actually could have turned it off before I remove the cover but we'll do that here in just a second but these main power lines coming to the top right here are always going to be live even even once we turn this breaker off so we are going to go ahead and turn this breaker off now and our environment is going to get dark but thankfully there's a light on the camera so we should be able to still work with that so here we go [Applause] you're going to want to find a spot an open spot or an empty place where you can set the sense energy monitor inside of your panel typically the best spot is going to be right down near the bottom so we're just going to place that there that's where we're going to be working from and bringing all of our wires to now we're going to go ahead and get the breaker set up for where we're going to be powering our sense energy monitor from so when you're choosing your double pole breaker to feed the sense energy monitor you want to choose the smallest available size in this case it's going to be 15 amp is typically the smallest double pole breaker you'll be able to get to feed the sense energy monitor now the sense energy monitor uses a ridiculously small amount of power so it wouldn't even need anywhere near 15 amps and the device itself is certified and to be connected to any sized double pole breaker but just make sense to use the smallest available breaker if you do need to free up some space in your panel to add that then you can use this these couple of these tandem breakers to increase the space that you have available in side of your panel and this isn't my preferred method but if that's the only option you have it might be the way to go now the breaker that we're using here is a 15 amp double pole 240 volt breaker if you have space this is going to be your best option for installing the sense energy monitor but like I said we'll talk about another option here a little bit further into the video so connect the red and the black wires to each of the two terminals that are on the breaker itself and it doesn't matter the black or the red as far as which one goes to which side and now we're ready we can snap our breaker into position now we have one more wire here and this is the neutral that will be feeding the sense energy monitor and that simply just needs to go wherever your neutral bus happens to be so we'll go ahead and put that right here okay our power cables have been successfully connected to the breaker and now we're gonna take the other end and plug it into the sense energy monitor you just do that here there's only one spot where you can plug it in so you can't really mess that up so that part of the installation is done our main power connections have been made now we're gonna actually install the amp meters themselves up on where the service cables come in to your panel but before we do that we're going to connect it to the energy monitor for safety reasons according to the instructions I'm guessing it just so that there's a path to ground that's connected while you are working with these now you can see that there have these stickers on one side of these and on the opposite side they do not you seem to make sure that the side that with stickers faces the same direction for both clamps preferably up like like this so we're gonna clamp these around each one of these legs so I'm just going to use one hand because these are still live right here this that's still live power right there how to touch that it would be very unpleasant to clamp my second one around the other side you just want to make sure that there's enough room so that they can fully close and then you can rotate them back so that they are out of the way and that the panel cover will still be able to be put in place so we have two of the three connections made on the sense energy monitor we have our power feeding from our double pole breaker and then we have our two clamps that are actually going to monitor the amperage that is flowing through those wires the last thing we need to connect is our antenna technically the antenna could attach directly out of the sense energy monitor just like this and that's how you would do it if this were to be a counted externally but the problem with that is these cabinets are made of metal so we actually need to get this antenna outside of the panel so we have to open one of these half-inch knockouts on this outside edge so that we can stick that through so we'll do that next if your panel happens to be flush mounted meaning that the panel is actually recessed back into the wall you will take your antenna and you'll have to actually stub it down so you'll open a knock out in the bottom of the panel most likely or the top depending on your scenario and then this antenna is basically going to stick down in the wall it'll be behind the drywall and it'll still work perfectly fine so if you do have a flush mounted panel you'll be going down or up with your knock out instead of going out the side and I am actually just going to open this knock out right here in the bottom because it happens to be right next to where the energy monitor is located attach the antenna to the extension cable and take the extension cable and pull it through the 1/2 inch knockout that we just opened and it'll snap into place then you can bend that intent of the direction that you want this most out of the way now we take the opposite end of our antenna cable and then plug it into the antenna port if your panel is totally filled with breakers already you can technically piggyback the sense energy monitor onto another existing 240 volt circuit right down here we have a 30 amp circuit which is for an electric dryer the sense energy monitor uses a tiny amount of power so that additional load on that breaker is not really going to change anything you can't even get breakers that are small enough to protect these wires for the sense energy monitor this product has went through a bunch of different testing to be approved to be installed inside of a panel like this so for safety considerations this meets code for this device to be inside inside of a panel now if we were to want to put these wires onto this breaker in addition to these existing ones there's one thing that we should check and it just requires popping out the breaker that you are looking at or the one that you want to check to see if this is going to work when you pull this off you can see these terminals here the wire is going on on one side of the screw now there's a space on the opposite side that you can actually insert a second wire and depending on the breaker this can actually meet code now if you look here on the side of this breaker right here there is some detailed writing that tells us right here this top diagram is showing the there's just one wire underneath the screw and it says four to eight gauge aluminum or copper now the one right underneath it says that it can have two wires of 14 to 10 gauge copper so this actually can allow a second wire to be connected on it so if your if your panel is totally full I wouldn't be concerned at all about connecting the sense energy monitor to that breaker and piggybacking on the existing 240 volts circuit always check your local codes and talk to your local inspector to make sure that that's something that will be approved in your area but like I said if at all possible install a separate breaker for the sense energy monitor and get the smallest available breaker for a 240 volt circuit which most the time is going to be 15 amps so just remove the knockouts in the panel cover for the new breaker if you did install one and then we'll go ahead and put this in place now we can go ahead and turn on the main breaker to the house and then we'll turn on the breaker that is going to be powering the sense energy monitor in a few seconds we should hear a tone coming from the panel once you turn it on it will give you an audible sound indicating that is ready to be set up I'm not going to go through every step in how you configure that it's pretty self-explanatory as you go through the app so this is what the app looks like once you get everything set up you can see right now we're using 1000 watts or a little bit more sense also has a really nice web application where you can see additional and more detailed information about the different appliances and power usage in your home one of my favorite views though is this meter view right here which gives us a really cool graph of how the power usage ramps up and ramps back down and you can kind of go through and see the history of the day of the week the month the year and see how much how much power you've been using one of the great thing is that they charge no subscription fee for using their services after you have purchased the device so you purchase the device one time and then going forward you access to the full features for the sense energy monitor so that completes the installation of the sense home energy monitor if you want to see how the sense energy monitor works with a generator click on this video right over here towards the end of that video I actually show how the sense energy monitor works when you are operating on generator power if you want to see more electrical videos make sure you click the subscribe button down below and hit the bell to be notified about future episodes thanks again for watching and we'll talk to you right over there

Channel: Benjamin Sahlstrom

Views: 50,904

Rating: 4.9653931 out of 5

Keywords: Sense Home Energy Monitor, Sense, Coupon Code, Discount, Electrical, Wiring

Id: u2HOC-iH53g

Length: 11min 4sec (664 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 28 2020