Thank You, Sense Community

Sense is all about the crowd — as you likely already know, crowdsourced data drives the device detection algorithms that provide all of us the detailed insights about our homes. But the “crowd” has another big part to play as well: the Sense Community. 

Since March 2018, I’ve had the pleasure of managing our core Community channel, community.sense.com. Hopefully you’re already aware of it and are a registered member, but if not: Community.sense.com is our online forum. It’s readable by all but posting is limited to Sense users only. It is a fantastic place to hear directly from us (you can find me there as RyanAtSense) but also to talk with fellow Sense users — check in and see how your experiences meshes with the Sense experience of others, get some help identifying unknown devices, share your stories, chat about other smart home tech, and much more. In addition to conversation, it’s a great place to hear about new app, firmware, or major device detection updates as well as learn about known issues. 

As of November 1, 2019, we’re about 3.1k users strong on the community.sense.com site, with over 37k total posts. So far in 2019, we have 600 new registered members. The Community is no slouch! Sign up and see for yourself.  

But this isn’t purely a promotional post. In the spirit of the month, I want to take a few moments to simply shout out a big “thank you” to our Community members and our entire userbase at large. Not only do you keep the product moving forward — and our product and engineering teams very busy! — but you keep each other moving forward with Sense. 

I’m just a couple months shy of my two year anniversary with Sense and I spend multiple hours in the Community every single day. That’s a lot of logged time and I’ve witnessed a lot of interactions. I can hands down say that I have never been a part of an online community that is as helpful and respectful as this one. Whether a member is having trouble IDing some odd energy spike that occurs every 15 minutes, needs help diagnosing an unrelated HVAC issue, wants to share a fascinating insight, discuss a useful feature, or just wants to brag about their savings (you know you do), there’s always someone to help — or listen, pat your back, share their own story, or, yes, sometimes tell you how you’re wrong. But even in that last case, criticism is constructive, and that’s how we like it. 

It's not just about help and respect on the Community. It's about passion too. Sure, there's passion about energy savings (because energy savings mean cost savings), but there's also energy savings for the sake of the greater good — the planet we all live on. For that, we can all give thanks. We can't wait to see even more Sense users become Net Zero, just like Don Powers.

I’d be remiss if I didn't take a quick moment to plug another community-focused site of ours, Sense Saves. We started Sense Saves earlier this year. While it’s related to the core Community, in that it’s a great place to share your Sense stories, it’s much more focused on that specific purpose. If you want to learn how to save with Sense, Sense Saves is the place to go. Check it out and be sure to share any stories that you have. If you want to see some recent highlights from the site, check out this blog post: These Users Have Saved Almost $5,000 with Sense.   

So, here’s to you, Sense Community and Sense users. You’re awesome and it continues to be an absolute pleasure working alongside all of you. Happy Sensing...and Happy (early) Thanksgiving.

About the Author: Ryan LaLiberty is the Community Manager at Sense. You can find him on community.sense.com as RyanAtSense.