Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've now had sense installed almost a week, and will update this review as events progress. At this point my feeling is that while Sense may be a great development of interest to those who were familiar with what was possible before, they have clearly oversold and under-delivered to the mass populace. Installation Installation wasn't as smooth as I'd hoped. There were no real instructions online, so no way to see what installation would entail until the product arrived. I took Sense's word for it and hired an electrician for the day Sense would arrive. It turns out you just need to connect Sense to a breaker so it has power, and place two sensors around your incoming mains...something almost anyone can do without hiring a ridiculously expensive electrician. After seeing the electrician off, I then spent an hour trying to get my Sense app to connect. Sense had made the 'successfully installed' tone when we turned power back on, so I was confused. Eventually, buried in the help docs, I found that Sense only listens for BT setup connections for the first 15 minutes. After that you need to flip the breaker off and on. That's a terrible design decision; it should listen until something connects and it's setup. But if they had to design it this way it should at least be placed in big bold letters on the 'connection failure' screen. Note that I mentioned Bluetooth. You will need a phone or tablet with bluetooth to set Sense up. This is not optional, even if you plan to use a PC to do all your reporting and monitoring. In short, I could not easily install and setup Sense myself in 20 minutes, but due to poor design/instructions I paid an electrician over $100 and wasted several hours on it. Performance For the first day or two everything was an unknown device, though it was neat to be able to see my total household power usage at any given time, and watch it change as I switched stuff on and off. It said to wait 24 hours before devices started to appear. I didn't see my first device until 40 hours in, and it was named motor 1. I spent much time running around the house trying to figure out what it was to no avail. It turned on every time I used the hot water so I thought it may be my tankless water heater, but it only used 2kw, and I watched "other" jump to 15-20kw at the same time (which is what the heater is capable of using), so it really didn't make sense. My best guess is that it was one of the three coils in the heater, but I still don't know why it would only use 2kw. It didn't matter in the end anyway, as after a couple days, and all that time trying to track it down, it just disappeared from my UI! At this point I also have "Pump 1" and "Motor 2", which don't seem to correspond to anything either; I've checked all the appliances and pool equipment. I'm guessing they're components of something larger. I have "Microwave" which reads power usage when the microwave is on, but it also read 1350w when I was sitting there eating dinner and the microwave hadn't been on for almost 20 minutes. I have "AC" which finally showed up on day 5, but it reads as off when I hear my AC compressor spin up. I also tried cycling similar devices (like my pool heater) but nothing lit it up. And "AC" is listed as consuming 1300-1400 watts when it is running, despite the fact I can watch "Other" jump by 3kw - 4kw every time the AC comes on. And that's it. Almost a full week and I have 2 device identified, 2 devices that I'm supposed to identify, and 90% of my power usage falls into "Other" and "Always On". Hardly the recipe for making energy saving improvements. UI There seem to be more features in the app than on the desktop (HTML) interface, which is weird. My computer is where I want to create my spreadsheets, run reports, create predictive models...I can't do that on my phone. It seems like a design decision was made to cater to vacuous young first time homeowners who are interested in flash but without the attention span for depth. (not that all young adults are like that; just the ones this app is catered to). That doesn't matter anyway, because there are no spreadsheets. There are no CSV downloads or even reports that list on/off times. Besides being absolutely require for running any kind of predictive models, this is the most important information you need to identify devices! I raised this point with support and they said their dev team was considering it. I've been a web applications developer for 20 years...if basic reporting of critical data was not in my project plan before I even wrote a line of code I'd be reprimanded in almost any job I've held. This is absolutely unacceptable. The lack of reporting is made more critical by the fact that the interface lies. After spending an hour trying to track down a device the other day that my phone showed as off the entire time (even though the device I thought it was had turned on and off a few times), I finally looked at my computer to see that the web interface showed it as on. So one of the two interfaces was lying. I've seen this other times too. And I've also noticed that the web interface will show something as off, but after I refresh the page it shows as on. On/Off reports aren't the only problem. I watched a device turn off the other day (even had the alerts on my phone set so that I got instant notification). It was the device that I identified as being associated with my hot water. However, within 15 seconds of it turning off my phone reported the device as "Off for 16h". Less than 2 minutes later my computer reported it as "Off for 26m". So was it off for 1 minutes, 26 minutes, or 16 hours? Was I hallucinating the alerts? How can we possibly be expected to identify a device with such wildly inaccurate data!? The UI really seems to be the biggest problem with Sense; even worse than the poor identification. And that's because it's not just doing a poor job; it's actually giving us incorrect information. Conclusion I'm really not sure what was out there before. Maybe pre-Sense our only option was a meter to see how much total power was coming into the home, and Sense is an amazing breakthrough. And maybe after a few months of learning Sense will be more accurate and give me useful data. I really don't know. And that's the point: I really don't know. Neither does most of the public who doesn't really have experience with this sort of thing (read: the vast majority). So when Sense promises things like "Over time, Sense's machine learning algorithms identify unique signatures in the power use of individual devices within your home and match them against a growing database of appliances and home electronics" we have no context within which to evaluate them. So Sense really has a responsibility of setting a context...or at least letting people know that "over time" means timescales measured in weeks, or even months or years. So far I have learned nothing that will help me save money on my electric bill. Instead, I'm out $400 and countless hours trying to be a Sense detective. Maybe my feelings on Sense will change over time as it learns more, and if that happens I'll leave an update, but for now I'm not happy at all that I purchased this product.