Category: Habit Change

Using Sense, I found one of my big usages was a hot tub heater which came on randomly every several hours (and a lot more in the winter, as expected). I purchased an ECO WiFi power switch box with a timer that allows me to turn off the heater during peak periods, and I shifted to turning on the heater in the super off peak beginning of the day before 6 am when electricity costs 7 cents a Kw hour.

We live in Massachusetts so the cost per kwh is inherently much more expensive than average in USA, hence the higher savings in adopting sense. Our estimated total annual savings will be around $2,500 at current supply distribution rates and our August 2019 vs August 2018 usage. Notably 2018 was much warmer in Massachusetts than in 2019, but as per the sense analysis, seasonality couldn’t explain the delta in savings we achieved… the culprit was the water circulation pump draining the 80 gallon water heater on a continuous basis!

We had been living for one year in our newly constructed home and immediately took issue with our electric bill. Our whole street is comprised of newly built houses by the same builder and all of them were running equally high electric bills yet with no knowledge of the source. We asked for a MassSave inspection and they determined our home to be maxed out in energy efficiency (e.g. appliances, foam insulation, LEDs, etc). We had already turned down the water heater dial to 120º and our Nest HVAC was getting several green leafs, thus we were told our electric bill was the cost of living in a large house with six people and we couldn’t really do much about it.

We installed Sense to try to get a better handle of what was going on. The main culprit turned out to be the water circulation pump which has a small wattage usage but causes the water heater to continuously run. We purchased a Kasa smart plug on put the circulation pump on a timer, which proved to be immediately effective in lowering our wattage usage. However, we realized that the water heater was still running quite a bit during the day so we installed an Aquanta to control for the water heater hours of operation. The end result was a 1st month savings that paid for sense (!!!!).

Everyone tells you that the water heater is one of the main culprits but not even the experts put two and two together. Only with sense did we identify that the water circulation pump was the main problem. Since then we’ve enjoyed calculating other energy savings/costs. For instance, we installed a well which we knew would save us a ton of money in water (and pay for itself in two years as a result) but we didn’t know the cost of running the well pump. Sense didn’t quite identify the well pump yet (b/c it struggles with variable motors) but we were able to see that when the irrigation went on it correlated with a 2kwh spike in sense’s Power Meter. Other benefits have continued to pop us as I now know how long our cleaning service actually vaccums the floors b/c it is its own separate device. We also teach our kids about energy use as sense can tell when they leave their bathroom lights on. The list goes on and on. No doubt there are plenty of opportunities for improvement but it already paid for itself and their customer service is absolutely phenomenal.