Energy analysis tools

Announcing Sense HomeCheck

Introducing a free, beta service to help identify electrical malfunctions, like appliance failure and power outages, in Sense users’ homes.

We are excited to announce the public beta of a new service called Sense HomeCheck!

We’ve known for a while that with the detailed energy signals we are processing, we may be able detect at least some number of things which can go wrong in your home. In fact, we have already been seeing certain types of failures by working with some customers who have reached out.  So, we want to start doing this in a more organized way and are opening up a free, public beta of this feature for all Sense users.

Over time, we will be able to use the sort of data modeling we use for device detection for this kind of analysis. But, all machine learning algorithms rely on data, so one of the goals of Sense HomeCheck is to provide data which will help us identify and model the sorts of things which can happen in homes. In the near-term, Sense HomeCheck will be mainly a manual process of getting a problem report from a customer, tracking down the data, seeing if we can learn more about what happened, and then providing a report back to you.

Once we start to see patterns in the data, we will be able to automate the detection of certain types of problems. We are already seeing things which we think we can automate pretty soon, but we expect this to be an ongoing process of more and more data feeding into better and better modeling.

How It Works

If you have a problem in your home which you think might be detectable by Sense, you can submit a problem report here. These problems can range from specific issues with an appliance in your home (heat doesn’t come on sometimes, oven failed) or the wiring itself (lights flicker, circuit breaker trips repeatedly, etc), or unexplained energy use (extremely high bills and can’t figure out why).

We will prioritize problems based on severity, likelihood we can help, and whether we see other similar problems happening.  We are providing this as a beta service with limited availability, and at no cost.  Since it will be mainly a manual process to start with and we don’t know the volume of requests, we cannot guarantee response times or if we can even address the problem you have, but just receiving reports of the problems you’re interested in us researching will help guide our development.

We hope this new service will be helpful in diagnosing problems in your homes and we are looking forward to working on this with you.