Sense – A Smart Monitor for your entire home

sense.com

2 pointszbruhnke2 comments

I see this advertised a lot on Facebook. I'm pretty skeptical of this, though. It attempts to detect energy consumption for particular appliances by the pattern of current load, but I can't imagine this being accurate for most people. Different appliances of the same type will generate very different patterns, and residential power distribution can be _extremely_ noisy.

I think it's an interesting idea, I just doubt the practicality of it.

I've actually seen a few projects that use this method over the past few years, and I think you're overestimating the challenge.

Once the servers know the fingerprint for a device, they can recognize that fingerprint in multiple homes. The device doesn't have to get everything perfectly correct right away, but it will recognize a fridge/freezer vs a dishwasher vs a television. A combination of use times, power load etc etc.

I'm not saying it's easy, but enough people have done or attempted to do it using the same method that I don't think it is probably as unreliable as you suspect.

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