Sense showed that my fridge was overactive

We’re finishing up a gut renovation of our kitchen. We’re buying a new, smaller fridge for it, but we moved the old one to the basement. The fridge compressor was turning on a bunch, but it is an older fridge and we had only recently purchased the house, so I didn’t know if this was common for this older make and model. I had also noticed that the freezer had a lot of frost throughout it and the light didn’t turn on, but again, older unit and I didn’t remember if the light had worked since we bought the house. Maybe the bulb was just burnt out. I’ve only had my Sense active for a week now, but that basement fridge was one of the first devices detected. I was able to use the power graphs to see that the fridge was on for close to half the day. That I knew wasn’t right. I used this data to really inspect the fridge and discovered that although the freezer drawer would fully close, the rubber gasket wasn’t sealing the top of the unit. I started to push and pull on the gasket and on the drawer itself, and bam! it dropped slightly onto the track. When I closed the door this time, the gasket fully engaged.

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The power meter for my fridge was critical in showing me in a very clean and clear way that my fridge was on for a LOT of time. The Sense has discovered my fridge working just a couple days, and now that makes even more sense with how often it was on. Using the power meter now I can see that before fixing the freezer drawer the compressor would be on for 15 minutes and off for 17 throughout the whole day. Now that the freezer properly seals, the compressor is only on for 9 minutes at a time and off for 34. That comes out to a more than 50% reduction in time the fridge is on. That still totals around 300 minutes, so 5 hours exactly, that it is on a day. Without another fridge to compare to, I don’t know if that is high or not, but now I have a baseline for when our new fridge arrives. Hopefully the new fridge won’t be on as much, which unfortunately probably means the Sense will take longer to identify it, but it’ll be super fun to compare energy usage between both shortly!

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