A Sixth Sense

Beta-testing the Smart Home future

One fateful day last August, I was skimming through my Facebook news feed and happened across an interesting sponsored post about home energy monitoring. With zero likes or comments, I figured I had to be one of the first handful of people to see it, or it was an absolutely terrible ad. Being the eternal optimist, I went with the former and clicked through to see what it was all about.

While light on details, the concept was sufficiently intriguing; I had a very vague idea of what kinds of products were out there (tangentially, Nest jumps to mind), but no specifics. After signing up to be a beta tester and waiting impatiently for the product outreach coordinator to get back to me, to my delight, I ended up being chosen. A few weeks later, everything came in a low-key box, complete with a very non-corporate packing list typed out by hand on a piece of computer paper, which was oddly refreshing after having dealt with nightmarish shipping scenarios from CDW-G during my time in the IT sector. After unboxing and taking the obligatory spread picture, I got on the phone and set about scheduling a visit from an electrician to have it installed, on Sense’s tab, as promised. The guy stopped by, and twenty minutes later I was all set to go. One brief configuration on my iPhone later, and everything was up and running!

The Hardware

While I am utterly confident that future production versions will boast the company’s signature orange and white color scheme as has been shown on ProductHunt, the beta test unit was quite literally a black box. A small black rectangular prism roughly the size of a box of ball-point pens, to be exact. It came with a pair of 200A current transformers that attached over the mains, wiring for the breaker installation, and a wireless adapter to connect my home network.

And surprisingly, that was it. Outwardly, a rather uncomplicated selection of equipment that was not intimidating at all as a whole. Everything fit neatly and cleanly inside the breaker box, with the only indication of its existence being the wireless antenna (Bluetooth and 802.11x compatible), which poked through one of the small knock-outs around the frame, at the bottom.

The Software

Despite being an aforementioned black box, the companion app is the solitary little window into the device. When you first load in, it walks you through a one-time setup that took no more than 5 minutes. First, the app pairs with the device via Bluetooth, in order to establish a secure connection and transfer wireless network credentials so that Sense can join your home’s wireless network and be accessible anywhere you have an internet connection. Over the first few days of use, you are steadily greeted with more and more colored circles on the home screen of the app, each of which, I would soon figure out, represented the currently active power draws on your home’s circuit that Sense is reading. On the bottom right is a constantly fluctuating number, which tells you what the total active wattage is at that moment in time, and that number corresponds directly to the real-time graphical visualization found by swiping left on the circle screen. It indicates the current total power draw and shows all the fluctuations it detects, both small ones from, say, a laptop charger being plugged in, and the large ones from an appliance being switched on, and flags them accordingly. It updates about once every two seconds, so it can get a little hectic if you stare too long, but the reporting features elsewhere in the app make that a non-issue.

Speaking of those reporting features.

The app has a “Trends” section that provides you daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly histograms of your total electricity usage. Underneath each graph is a percentage-based numerical representation of how much electricity each gadget that Sense has recognized is drawing, in decreasing order, so you see exactly what your biggest draws are at any given time. Sense gave me, for the first time, an in-depth representation of every bit of electricity usage in my house, as if I were looking at a perfectly itemized receipt. It really makes you aware of things that you know you’re tangentially aware of, but can’t be bothered to think about on a daily basis, like that you use more energy on hotter days when the AC is turned on; you are able to see, compared to other days, exactly how much more energy you use, and which things are drawing.

For all the data whizzes out there, this is your wet dream. Ever wonder how much extra electricity you’re using when you walk out the door to go to work, remember that you left the bathroom light on, but you’re running late so you figure it’s not worth it to run back inside? (Totally not me.) Now there’s no excuse. Imagine being able to track exactly how much less power you’re using by turning off one more light bulb, or by unplugging your cable box when you go away on vacation, or being able to know for sure that the new furnace you installed really is more energy efficient, and watching the savings accumulate…the future of conservation is here, folks.

But let me tell you about the best feature of the app, now sadly cryogenically frozen for improvements: Teach Me.

Teach Me made me feel like a kid again. The gist is that you prepare the device by touching a couple buttons on the app, then turn on/plug in an appliance, wait 10 seconds, then unplug/turn it off. During that prep time and 10 second “listening” period, the device monitors your circuit, and specifically tries to detect any new electrical signatures. Then it tells you whether it recognized the draw, and will start learning it over the next couple weeks or whether you need to retry because there was too much electrical noise. Running around with my iPhone in hand, switching lights on and off, plugging in toasters, having a legitimate excuse to flip through channels on the tv…it was like I had just moved into a new house and was discovering every cool little thing I had never seen before. I felt a rush of excitement I hadn’t felt since I was much younger, when we did science experiments on a weekly basis in middle school. And the first time Sense told me that it had successfully learned a new thing that I had helped teach it, I did a little fist pump. No shame.

But Sense doesn’t need much help. It’s already pretty damn smart. It found all the major appliances in my home right away, including the garage door motors and a microwave, and correctly identified them as such. This is the best part about the machine learning aspects of Sense; the engineering team did their job in pre-programming a bunch of common power draws associated with the makes and models of all sorts of appliances, and what ranges to look for, but the more data it reads over time, the better it gets. With the help of its userbase, it figures out nuances in different power draws, and can learn about every unique circuit to help you get the most detailed information possible about your house.

Room for Improvement

There are still a few kinks to work out; very low draws from things like smartphone chargers can be difficult to pick out from the normal fluctuations in your home’s circuitry. Which, from a layperson’s point of view, makes some sense; it takes a while for the Sense to figure out how “noisy” your house is and figure out what the signals are. It also has trouble with functionally identical gadgets/appliances on the same subcircuit. For example, it can’t tell both of my garage door openers apart. Which also makes sense because I bought two of the same model and installed them roughly at the same time. But whenever I run into something irksome along the lines of those two complaints, I have to remind myself that any data-driven venture gets better over time. The longer I have it, the more attuned to my house it becomes, and the larger the pool of data Sense draws from, the more accurate it gets for everyone.

The Future

It feels like we as a technological society are on the cusp of major breakthroughs in the smart home with things like Phillips Hue, Amazon’s Echo, and so on. But for all the advancements we’ve made, the residential electrical panel is one of the last frontiers to conquer. I’ve been fighting that fight with Sense for the last 7 months and hope to do so for the rest of this year and many more to come.

For most everyone our house is our castle. It is a place of comfort, of safety, of refuge, and of growing up. It gives us pride, and it requires love and attention just like everything else. We talk to our house, whether it’s in the quiet moments where we think out loud about what we’ll do in the new year, or what kinds of things we want from life. About our insecurities, our fears, our frustrations about how that damn showerhead is leaking again and our righteous anger in assembling a new piece of furniture that just won’t fit togeth-oh, there we go; never mind, honey, I got it! Our house hears us, and it gladly listens when we need it to. But our house also talks to us. There just hasn’t been a good way to listen.

Until now.

Addendum: It appears as though Sense has picked up on this piece, and with a wider audience, some people have privately asked for additional screenshots, which I am happy to provide here. If there’s anything specific you’d like to hear from me, feel free to ask! I’ll be watching this a bit more closely in the future :S