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Sense — See what's up. Know what's on.
Sense installs in your home's electrical panel and provides real-time insight into your energy use and home activity through our iOS, Android, and web apps.
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@cmicali Hey Chris, this looks fantastic. It seems crazy that we get electricity bills through the door without an exact run-down of where the charges come from. I look forward to knowing exactly how much each appliance costs me. Will this product work in the UK? If not, do you have plans to adapt it for the UK?
@marty Hi, thanks! I think it is crazy there is no visibility today into our energy usage and we are going to fix that. We are focusing on the US first but support for other countries is on the roadmap. I expect the UK will be near the top of our list.
@cmicali this is awesome! Does sense also have the ability to shut off & turn on a breaker remotely? I could see this being useful if you leave home with the stovetop on, or even useful for people who are doing electrical work but have their circuit breaker in an inconvenient location.
@nicgdragon Sense does not support control of devices yet, but a pretty natural thing after seeing you've left the basement lights on for the 5th time this week is to want to be able to turn them off remotely. We have plans to support WIFI-controllable devices first and go from there.
@cmicali Hi Chris, great idea - looking forward. Any chance to create a version that doesn't require an electrician to install? Maybe connects to an outlet or is connected like a fuse (the old ceramic ones) ? I fear that this requirement will scare off people.
@moravtchik We spent a lot of time investigating alternative approaches that did not require an electricianbut none of them got us the fidelity of data required to detect devices reliably. One idea we have yet to explore in-depth is building a breaker that has the Sense hardware inside of it, so you could just plug it into your panel. I agree electrician install adds a lot of friction and if/when can simplify install, we will.
@cmicali @moravtchik That's ok - I think when people understand how much they can save by monitoring their electrical usage, the electrician part won't be such a big problem. Once it becomes popular I'm guessing electricians will advertise (maybe even sell) they do "Sense" installs. Good luck!
@haroon Sense does not yet today reliably detect electric vehicles, but we are working on it now. Only one of our beta testers has an EV so we don’t have enough examples yet of what they look like. As we get more examples of EVs charging from our users, Sense will get better and we hope to have detection working reliably very soon. As tempted as I am to expense a Tesla to help accelerate this there are probably more prudent ways to allocate company cash 😁
Hello! We built Sense because we believe homes should be more energy efficient, but we lack good information on where we spend our energy. We realize though, that plenty of people would like to have more information about what’s going on in their homes — without cameras or putting tons of sensors all over the house. So our first set of features focuses on home awareness.
The app tells you what’s on at home (Did you leave on the iron?), when things happen (Is the garage door open? Did you kids get home from school), and how much energy each appliance uses (Should I replace that old fridge in the basement?)
Sense consists of a monitor (as pictured above) plus two current sensors that are attached to the mains inside your electric panel. Install is simple and quick (10-15 min on average) but must be done by an electrician (those mains are live ⚡️)
A little bit about our team and company history: Our background is in speech recognition. When the three of us left Vlingo (by then, Nuance) we wanted to work on a technical problem that uses our expertise in signal processing, machine learning, mobile, and software. We also wanted to do something that has a positive, real impact. We started reading all the academic research about “non-intrusive load monitoring” and thought - wow, this is a solved problem. Hah! Nope! We found that, like speech recognition 20 years ago, what works in the lab is much harder in the real world, where data is messy. Three years later, with the help of our beta tester community, we have cracked this problem and found an approach that works. We are now starting to ship product and as we get more users and more data, Sense will get better over time!
Sense formally launched at the end of October as a quiet “early adopter launch” to get more product feedback from the tech community and to get data that allows us to increase our coverage of devices. We were surprised by how quickly we sold out of our first production run (which we have already started to ship), so we are now building a second small production run that will ship by the end of March. We’d love to get your feedback on Sense and will make it available to any Product Hunter at the early adopter price. If we’ve sold out just get in touch (email, twitter, pm, whatever) and we will sort you out.
@aaran_mcguire Sure - The Sense monitor measures current (with 2 current transformers clipped around the mains, not per-circuit) and voltage of your home’s electric feed at a very high rate. Then, on the monitor, we do signal processing, event detection, and pattern matching on those signals and hypothesize what is currently on, similar in concept to recognizing speech in an audio signal. The Sense app shows what is on in real time, a configurable timeline of what was on, and a set of historical/trend features that let you see your energy usage over time broken down by device. Happy to go into more details on a specific part of it...
@cmicali @aaran_mcguire Is there a training mode? For example it could say turn on washer, and then I could turn it on and it could learn that signal?
@joshdance @aaran_mcguire We have been testing one internally, but it will be a while before we bring it into the app. We want to make sure the experience is good enough (and that the training system is working well enough,) and getting these things right is taking some time.
@cmicali so whats your end goal for this product? I see a interesting product, but I'm not sure it has enough at the moment to become something that people want/need? are there going to be further investments to what the app can do?
@cmicali @aaran_mcguire Would love to see image of what those CT sensors look like. I have tried some other energy monitoring systems and those clips could not handle 200Amp 2-phase panel. Just would not fit around mains.
First, need this for my home! Second if this works as advertised and as more device fingerprints are discovered this will be a must have in every new construction. Electric companies should have already provided this type of functionality. Glad to see this and hope it's a success. With momentum I see a Nest acquisition in your future!
You manage what you measure. I love the promise of this product. Curious how difficult it is to configure/use . . .
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