Products We Think Are Cool Sense Home Energy Monitor
Have you ever wondered how many hours your kids spend watching TV? Or better yet, how many times have you been lying in bed, trying to remember if you left a light on downstairs? Well, the days of wondering are over. Now there’s an app for that.
It’s actually more than an app. The product is called Sense. It’s a home energy monitor that connects directly to your electric panel. It tracks individual devices and reports its findings through an app on your phone. The main objective of the product is to help you save energy.
It’s A Game-Changer
Sense works by picking up each device’s unique signature and displaying the device’s activity as a timeline within the app. You can pull up historical data on your devices as well, allowing you to monitor any changes in energy use. Sense measures your home’s entire electric consumption at a rate of one million times per second, so you can trust its real-time reporting is accurate and extremely detailed.
The product operates through machine learning and signal processing to figure out which devices in your home are sending what signals, so that it can recognize, for example, the difference between your microwave and toaster and report on each device individually. Its ability to learn subtle differences in signals is helpful if you have more than one of the same device, like multiple TVs. Sense learns the difference and reports on each individually. You can also rename your devices in the app, so if you have a downstairs TV and an upstairs TV, you can track each more easily based on the names you’ve given them.
Information You’ve Only Dreamed of Is Now at Your Fingertips
This kind of insight into how we use energy in our homes is something a lot of us dream about. Many of us want to know how to cut our energy use, but don’t know where to start. Well, the days of not knowing how much energy you spend lighting your home or watching TV are over.
The Sense app comes with a ton of cool features. One handy feature is that you can set up customized alerts, so you can use it to let you know things like when the laundry is done or when the garage door opens. But one of the most important features is that Sense monitors how much energy is produced by individual appliances, allowing you to make small changes to lower your energy bill.
On top of tracking how much energy each of your home’s devices use, Sense also lets you know if a particular device is using more energy than usual. This function is super helpful in detecting problems with your appliances. An example of this is it might alert you to the fact that your fridge is leaking coolant, so you can get it fixed before it has an undesirable impact on your electric bill.
Something else this product can do that doesn’t just have a positive impact on how much you spend on electricity, but also on your family’s safety, is that through the app’s news feed, you can tell if you’ve accidentally left a device on, like a curling iron. That way you can turn it off before it becomes a potential fire hazard.
Mike Phillips, Sense’s CEO, and his co-founders created Vlingo, which is the speech-recognition software used by Siri. They used some of this same technology to develop Sense’s ability to recognize electrical signals. Their team of specialists has launched 59 products and has 33 patents issued. Now the company is using all of their combined data and tech experience to focus on energy monitoring.
