Most people have no idea what’s using energy in their home. They get a bill at the end of the month with no way to know what is driving their costs. Was it the old fridge, the dishwasher, or something left running overnight? That’s not a minor inconvenience, it’s a gap in how people understand their energy.
We believed that if people had real insights about their energy, what they’re using, when, and why, it would change how they use it. And that, at scale, is where the real impact lives. Our mission is to reduce global carbon emissions by transforming the relationship between people, their homes, and the grid. That kind of change can start in one home. But to matter at the scale the world needs, it has to reach millions.
The foundations for this go back decades. In the early 1990s, researchers at MIT showed it was possible to understand energy use inside a home from a single point of measurement. The science was sound and the idea was compelling. But doing it at scale required infrastructure that didn’t exist yet and it would take decades for the technology to catch up.
When we started Sense, the electric meters in homes weren’t capable of doing this work yet. So, we built our first products another way, the device you know as the orange monitor. It was how we got started, and how we proved the idea was real. One home at a time, we learned what the technology could do: the fridge cycling on, the dryer finishing, the EV charging at midnight.
You made it real with us. The questions you asked, the patterns you found, the bugs you reported, that wasn’t just feedback, it was the foundation.
Our mission has always been bigger than one device could reach. Giving people real insight into their energy can lead to meaningful change. Lower bills, more control, and a real reduction in carbon impact. But that kind of change doesn’t happen one orange box at a time, it has to reach everyone.
Now, the meters have caught up. A new generation of smart meters is starting to be deployed to homes, and these aren’t just billing devices. They’re intelligent sensors sitting right at the edge of the grid, capable of doing what the orange monitor does, without hardware, without the installation, for everyone.
Sense is working with utilities to make that possible. Not for tens of thousands of homes, but for millions. And it’s built on what you helped prove. The data from real homes, real devices and real edge cases. That doesn’t stop. The product that reaches millions will keep learning from the homes that showed us how, and that learning will continue to shape the experience you see in the app.
That’s what the orange monitor opened the door to. It proved the model, and it still does in every home that has one. What our work with utilities is making possible is reaching the people who would never have found us otherwise: the household that didn’t know they needed it, the person who’d never buy a piece of hardware. The utility delivers Sense to them, it’s the same intelligence, the same experience, just without the hardware.
For those of you with an orange monitor in your home, nothing changes. Your device, your data, your support, all of it continues.
We proved the technology in one home and now we can deliver it to every home.
This is just the part of the story where it gets bigger.
