Sense Energy Monitor Install and Review

welcome here and this is going to be our five month review of the sense that we installed to monitor our electricity in the house so let's take a look first thing we're going to do is head over to our panel box and we'll talk about the installation process for this thing it's pretty straightforward but there's a couple of important things to note so i'll go ahead and pull the covers off and let's get right to it the first part of the install is these two clamps that you have right at the top and getting them around pretty easy if you have a ton of room uh although mine uh one of them was on went on super quick and easy the other one not so much you'll notice there's a zip tie on the one on the right hand side there and the tip for you here is make sure that these things are closed all the way and they stay closed so one way to do that is to put some painters tape over the tongs and put the cover on and just kind of give it a test fit pull it back off and make sure that they stay shut and the reason that this is important for you is i found mine was not accurate or not totally accurate and that was the cause one of my clamps was open just a little bit so the zip tie on there i know it stays closed that works for me both of these will have a wire that goes down and it will plug right into the sense unit so that part of it is pretty straight forward next thing you'll need to do is install a double breaker and this is just so that your sense unit understands what the voltage is because voltage times the amps is how we calculate the watts so that needs to be accurate if you don't have room the draw is going to be so small in this unit i would have no hesitation piggybacking it off of another breaker if that is something that you have to do for your install the antenna they did actually include a an extension wire so all you're going to do is punch with the knockout run the extension right from the sense box over to that and the antenna pops in so that's really really very simple once you have all the three wires hooked up you just plug them into the unit and now you do want the app installed on your phone before you plug in or before you power this thing up i think it's got like a 15 second window to identify itself with the app so make sure you have the app installed on the phone before you do the first or initial power-up and it'll ask you some questions about the wi-fi etc to get to get itself established pretty much the only thing that you got to kind of look out for when you're doing the install is just make sure that you have room on the top of your box for those two clamps to go over the power wires for me that was the toughest part i ended up having to play around there for probably an hour and a half two hours to get those clamps in there and for them to work properly that's it after you got that fired up and you got the confirmed operation on your app you can go ahead and throw everything back in there and close it up again here i'm not trying to give anybody an electrical advice if you're not sure what to do in here this is deadly current that can be in here and keep in mind even if you shut your main off those main wires at the top they are still alive so if you're not sure what to do in here i'm probably 80 stupid for going in there myself you should probably hire a licensed electrician a smarter version of me would do that although i didn't and it's in there whatever let's move on so after you get this thing all powered up it's not going to show you all the fancy bubbles that you that everybody's seen you probably just get the one that just says other or i think it even takes a couple of days before that thing even shows up powered up let it define devices as soon as it finds devices you can name them and that's a little bit of sleuth work to sometimes figure out what's going on when in doubt i've taken and just shut everything off in the entire panel box every breaker and one at a time turned it on to help eliminate it most have been pretty straightforward and you can kind of tell by the timing of stuff what it is to name it the inside of the app is pretty awesome this is the screen everybody uh loves to look at this this is the one i love to look at tells you the water juice of everything that you've got currently going plus you can play with the bubbles i mean why not the good part about this thing too is it lets you marry devices so what do i mean by that let's say your fridge has a defrost cycle has a pump and lights and all kinds of other stuff in there dishwashers like this too once you find out uh the pieces of that unit you can put them together so that they all show up i think my fridge has a separate compressor a separate cycle or something for the fridge and for the freezer portion so i had to do that with the with the fridge the aquarium heater as well is actually two aquarium heaters not just the one and that's very straightforward to do in the uh devices tab if you click on the trends tab you can kind of see when i have this thing first set up i think i had this thing on for about four days prior to this but this was the clamp issue i was telling you but it wasn't reading accurately it wasn't i was comparing it with the reading off my meter outside and it wasn't lining up so that's how i started doing some research and figuring out the clamps have to be totally closed so just heads up for you but after that point in time as you can see here this thing has been flawless for me uh from september the 18th i think is what that date is and there is a spot in the setup i think it's under the devices or one of the tabs at the later on it'll let you plug in actually what your hydro rate is so if you look on the top right of mine you can actually see uh it's got a dollar value attached to it now this isn't peak off peak anything fancy like that i just put the mean number in and it's pretty close what it is very close on the part that i really like about it is the kilowatt hour usage it's usually within three or four kilowatts of what the power company has actually built me at so that's that's really good so anytime i want i can log in here and see exactly what we're using for power here's the power meter screen and you can zoom in whichever way you want and anywhere you scroll it'll actually tell you the date the time and how many watts you're using [Music] and what's really cool this is who says we're not creatures of habit i'll zoom out to a month and check that out you can tell there's a pretty good trend of when the power consumption is high low and what you're doing when i'm sure for us it's the stove and showering that's pretty religious when that happens so now if you're thinking you gotta wait for the little bubbles to show up until you can kind of see uh power information you definitely don't have to wait for that at any time you want you can click on the now and it'll show you your live host consumption at that point in time so for me right now here it's showing 25.50 now the cool part about this is you can run around to absolutely anything that you want in the house and you can turn it on and off and you can see what this stuff actually consumes so if you buy a new grow light and you do hydroponics you can kind of see how much power your your lights are using so the easy way to do this is to see what power something actually uses is run the app on your phone run it on the power meter and anything you see here you can do on your phone as well and go over to the device and turn it on [Applause] and you can very quickly see or off for this at this case here because it was already on but you can see the two bumps in the power jump down right away i usually give it like a five count or something just to make sure that there's no coincidence of anything else that happened to go on and off the same time some of the ones that use really little power like for instance in my hallway i've got three leds and i'll turn those on and you can see a tiny little little jump but almost nothing these things are extremely power efficient [Music] but just goes to show you and they're insanely bright too which is awesome leds are just fantastic have them all over the place in the house and then here again turn it back off and you can see the corresponding dip happen if you want to see something a little more dramatic i'll move on over to the stove and this will show you how much power this puppy drinks when you turn it on and i'll leave the number up there as well so you can see it went from 2 500 ish watts up to 7 900 so massive and then again just turn it back off to see the change so that's a pretty cool function of this thing live power consumption all the time that has so far helped help me figure out my big draw power devices inside the house which we have almost none of we actually do pretty good on power i think i probably use the most right now on plugging in the car outside block heater my grow lights actually do use because i have three running and they're about 330 watts a piece so that ends up adding up because they're on a good chunk of the day but my water tank that thing is a monster but i mean without this i would know where these draws are coming from and once you see these massive spikes you can quickly go around and kind of figure out what what's sucking your power even without the little bubble coming up you can also zoom in anytime you want to anything on your power meter and it'll show you the date that sorry it'll show you the exact time and exactly how many watts you're using at that point in time so if you know when something big turned on and you want to see you can always check it after the fact now onto the devices tab now the awesome thing about this unit is once you have your devices set up and you have them named and unfortunately you have to wait for this thing to kind of figure itself out but you can click on any appliance that you want and it's going to tell you the estimated yearly cost so for me here with the always on i'm using an estimated 244 dollars a year stuff that's just on in the house all the time so the more of those things i can cut out i mean that's that's some easy money i can save right there you can click on your dishwasher aquarium in my case too and it'll give you a very quick yearly estimated cost on anything that you got so that's pretty cool i really like that editing or changing anything inside of here is super easy all you do is you click on the device that you want to edit or change and in the case of me here today we just got rid of the old vacuum and a couple you may have already knows there's two vacuums here now we only have one vacuum in the house but what may happen here is if you're running the vacuum on one of the uh the power lines in and then you switch it to another plug in the house and it runs off of the other plug line it'll identify it twice so you can actually just marry that up and how it'd be the same device i knew we were getting rid of this thing shortly so i didn't bother so is this thing worth the price tag i don't know be honest with you not sure uh is it worth it for me for me it is if you intend on using the information that you get out of this box and uh find out what's sucking power up in your house and you do something about it you probably pay for this thing in two years is what i'm thinking so if you're using it to find out what's uh sucking power in your house you're gonna do something about it yeah it'll pay for itself quick if you want to plug it in and just see how cool it is well it's a waste of money go for coffee maybe don't go for coffee because of cold either whatever spend it on amazon buy your mother something nice she'll appreciate something for 500 bucks if you've got a different power monitor that you're using and it has some other cool features or you're curious about more information on a specific feature of the sense leave it in the comments down below and i'll try to get back to you as quick as i can if you like the video hit me up with a sub lets youtube know that you want more of this mug and that bold face till next time cheers people [Music]

Channel: House Dad Life

Views: 2,873

Rating: 4.8153844 out of 5

Keywords: sense home energy monitor, sense home energy monitor installation, sense home energy monitor review, home energy monitor, energy monitor, sense electricity monitor installation, sense electricity monitor review, sense energy monitor track electricity usage, sense electricity, sense electricity monitor, sense energy monitor review, neurio home electricity monitor, sense energy monitor, home energy monitor review, power monitor, home energy, sense, sense review

Id: vFP2qZukwjw

Length: 13min 58sec (838 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 21 2021