Does sense.com make any sense?

[bitman]

I admit my knowledge of electronics is very limited and I don't trust my own judgment in particular when it comes to high-powered stuff.  At home we're trying to find out what is consuming the electricity we're paying for - we're trying to do better and cut usage down so knowing where we are spending, or even more important, on what, is getting important.  Now, I could get a ton of "kill-a-watt" and plug it in everywhere. Except it wouldn't fit the bigger appliances like heating, washers etc.

So I came across https://sense.com. But I'm not sure it makes much sense which is my question. How can a device that just monitors the main line break down usage for each group? If this works, it would probably give me what I'm looking for but I really cannot see how this would work? How would it tell the difference between the AC running and/or the Dryer?

I've seen way too many "fake" product reviews to trust anything with big banners like this. Even eevblog has done it's share of refuting different products over time. Is this word the ink on the paper it's not printed on?

[MK14]

I wouldn't suggest you get one, as it is probably way too expensive and you want significant confirmation it really works, as advertised.

It is theoretically possible that it does work as described. But they may not be telling the full story. I.e. missing out on inaccuracies with it, how often it gets things wrong and it may not be trained up in enough devices to be truly useful.

I think you would be better off, using kill-o-watt meters, and common-sense/knowledge, on how much electricity common devices use.
E.g. Things which produce huge amounts of heat, usually use lots and lots of electricity.

Instruction manuals sometimes tell you how much electricity something uses. E.g. A TV.

[hermit]

It's easy enough to search up some reviews.  PCMag http://www.pcmag.com/review/349803/sense-home-energy-monitor and Cnet  https://www.cnet.com/products/sense-home-energy-monitor/review/ reviews are useful.  It gives you overall usage but is hit and miss on guessing appliances.  You have no way to control the guessing either.

[ataradov]

This BS was just discussed. How do you even find stuff like this? No, it does not work as described.

[coppice]

See https://www.eevblog.com/forum/reviews/'sense'-home-energy-monitor/msg1251536/#msg1251536

The two reviews above give very different pictures. One says the sense.com machine identified very few things. The other says it identified all his lights. That would be cool, if true. Lights are fairly low power devices, so identifying them among the high consumption ones presents a challenge. Identifying all of them sounds miraculous. I suspect that statement involved some vigorous hand waving.

There are number of these load disambiguating load monitors on the market. Its cool that they can disambiguate anything at all, but doing it reliably enough for enough devices to be useful........