To ensure you have the best experience with Sense, the following compatibility specifications are recommended:

Your home has:

• 2.4Ghz Wi-Fi network with consistent internet connection. Sense is not compatible with 5Ghz Wi-Fi signals.
• Its own electrical meter and accessible electrical panel.

Your mobile device runs on iOS or Android and has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity.

Your electrical panel:

• Is a split-phase 120/240V residential panel up to 200A.
• Must have enough space to fit sensor clamps with HxWxD dimensions of 3.375″ x 2″ x .75″ (85.73 x 50.8 x 19.05mm), and an inside diameter of 1”. The Sense current sensors may not be able to fit around busbars. Our sensor cables are 46″ (116.84cm) long and our power cable is 36″ (91.44cm) long. 
• Does not drop below 32°F (0°C) or exceed 122°F (50°C).
• Is not exposed to water or areas with high condensation (Sense complies with ANSI/IEC 60529 Rated IPx0).

For more information on electrical panel compatibility, check out this support article.

For information on Solar system compatibility, take a look here.

Sense should only be installed by a licensed electrician. Installation itself is quick and easy, but it requires opening up your electrical panel and connecting current sensors to the service mains. These wires are live, even with your main breaker switched off, and are thus very dangerous. Only a licensed electrician is qualified to work in these conditions.

When speaking with your electrician, let them know that Sense is an energy monitor that installs in your electrical panel with two clamp-on current sensors around the mains, and a 240V breaker which Sense uses for its power supply and also to measure voltage on both legs. Unless you have a spare 240V breaker in your panel, your electrician will likely need to provide a new one.

You may also wish to share with your electrician this blog post and video to help them get a better idea for what’s required.

A set of installation instructions is also included in the package, and available online.

With just two clamp-on current sensors, the Sense Home Energy Monitor takes current and voltage measurements over 1 million times every second. From this incredibly high-resolution data, it derives the electrical signatures of individual devices. In comparison, most “high resolution” smart meters only take measurements every couple of seconds…hardly real time! You can read more about how Sense works in this blog post.

Within the first week of installation, Sense should be able to find some common devices that cycle on and off frequently, like your refrigerator or microwave. Some devices will take longer to identify, until the algorithms have seen enough contextual data to reliably detect them.

There are devices that Sense won’t be able to recognize right away, but as more Sense Home Energy Monitors are installed across the US and Canada, our machine learning algorithms will have more data to generate models from, and the device detection capabilities will just keep growing!

Not everything. We’re able to identify many electrical devices in typical homes and continue to expand our device detection abilities. As we get data from more and more homes, the performance and coverage of our device detection will improve.

At Sense we take security very seriously and we do everything we can to ensure your data is secure. All communications between the Sense monitor, the Sense cloud servers, and Sense apps are encrypted with AES 128-bit encryption and TLS/SSL (HTTPS). Sense uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud servers and online storage. Personally identifiable information like email address and account information is stored in physically separate systems from any application data. Physical security is managed by Amazon and access to these production systems is limited to a very small group of Sense engineering team members.

Automated systems process the data collected from Sense monitors to detect devices, send notifications, generate report emails, and power the Sense apps. Sense never shares any of this data with 3rd parties without explicit user opt-in on a case-by-case basis (for example, when a utility wishes to provide discounts/services to their customers in exchange for sharing limited power data.) Sense support employees will on occasion need to access some of this data to troubleshoot issues, but again we will only access this data with explicit permission from you.

You can read our full privacy policy here.