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Vacation home electric way too high for years.

Device: Other Heater
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For years, the electric bill (from our electric baseboard heaters) in our vacation home was way too high, even when the house was unoccupied. There were obviously things that I didn’t understand, but nobody could offer any advice. Even though Sense could be better at detecting devices, I was able to monitor the overall usage, flip breakers, do some experiments, and determine that those unnecessary heating zones were making up a huge portion of my bill. It took a little bit of effort, but using Sense along with smart plugs, a Wi-Fi thermostat, Wi-Fi thermometers, and some oil-filled radiant heaters allowed me to cut my winter electric bill in half!

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Sense convinced renters to switch to gas heat

Device: Space Heater
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The last straw that convinced me to buy Sense was a $400 energy bill when last year it was under $100 for the same month. This year we began renting our basement and a backyard trailer hookup to generate extra income. We underestimated how much energy they may use, and we needed Sense to help us make sense of where we could reduce our bill, and this result didn’t take long.

The day after we had Sense installed, I could tell that for some reason, we were using a lot of energy at night while we were asleep. Sense had not yet identified any devices, but we could easily see with the Sense graph that the energy spiked around 10pm, and dropped again around 8am.

With the trailer renters out of town, we knew that these times correlated closely with when our basement renters were checking on the trailer cat, and when they were turning on the trailer space heater for the cold night. At this point, it was easy to verify we found the culprit by turning the heater on and off while watching the graph drop and spike. At roughly 1500W, we calculate it was costing us at least $60/month. What’s even worse is our suspicion that the trailer renters were not turning it off during the day when they were home, possibly costing us over $120/month.

At this point, less than 2 weeks after installation, Sense has identified 11 devices (2 new devices today). It is easily going to pay for itself with just this one aha moment, but I’m confident our savings has only just begun.