As Senior Marketing Manager at Dividend Finance, I often get the opportunity to work with our business development team to bring strategic partnerships onboard and into the Dividend marketplace. With most partnerships, I get to test out the product or service, and in most cases I become a big fan of what this new partnership has to offer
.
With Sense it was different, not only because I’m a self-proclaimed ‘smart home nerd’ (a title I wear with pride), but also because from day one of using their home energy and solar monitoring product, I was able to use the data it provided to start saving money!
Sense is a home energy and solar monitoring device that attaches to your main service panel and solar system through connectivity transformers (CTs). These CTs are able to read your electricity usages and production by sampling electrical wavelengths over 100 times per second. This allows the device to learn the specific wavelengths of devices in your home and report back through the Sense mobile app. The customer-friendly application helps you learn device-level electric consumption, the trends that coincide with those devices and, most importantly, it helps target devices or appliances that are using way larger than normal electricity.
That data can then be put to work to help save money. For someone like me, living in a fully electric home that was built in the late 70’s, my goal from day one was to bring down our home’s electrical carbon footprint. Like many homeowners do, I started with replacing all of the light bulbs with LEDs, then went onto installing smart thermostats on our antiquated baseboard heaters. Finally, I had a solar system installed, having thought I had made changes to make my home more efficient prior to the solar installation. Production was great, but I was still surprised by the amount of electricity our home would consume when the system wasn’t producing.
Then our VP of business development told me about this new partnership we were exploring with Sense, an innovator in home energy and activity monitoring. I went out and purchased one, and with the help of my brother (a certified electrician) we installed the Sense monitor on my home’s electrical panel.
In the first three months, the device has paid for itself, bringing to my attention that we had a broken floor heater that had been drawing insane amounts of electricity since we had moved in, and saving us about $80 a month right off the bat. As the app continued to monitor and learn, it alerted us that it had “found a new device,” and offered up suggestions as to what the device might be, based on its electrical signature. Now, after a few months a trend has emerged, and I’m learning that the electric washer and dryer that came with the house were also guilty of high consumption, which has led me down the process of beginning to replace them and continuing to help to drive down our electricity consumption.
Being a bit of a smart home nerd, I was really impressed with how Sense allowed me to easily track my solar production alongside our consumption in the easy to use app. At any point of the day I can check the bubble view to see what my current production vs consumption is, as well as look back at previous days and weeks to see how things are trending, making it easy to spot other opportunities for improvement.
I expect that we will continue to see smart learning devices like Sense enter the market over the next few years. The fact that Sense allows homeowners to take meaningful steps towards reducing their carbon footprint and monitoring their solar production were key drivers in Dividend seeking out a partnership with them.
The Dividend and Sense partnership provides the Dividend network of solar installation companies with the option to offer prospective and existing solar owners a Sense home energy monitor at a discounted rate by signing up to become a Dividend | Sense Pro. In addition to specialty pricing on the device, partners will receive access to training and resources to optimize the Sense monitor with prospective and existing customers. Dividend partners can sign up to become a Dividend | Sense Pro here.
If homeowners Interested in purchasing a Sense or Sense + Solar for your home, you can visit sense.com, or reach out to your solar installer to take advantage of their Dividend | Sense Pro discounted pricing. It is recommended to work with a professionally licensed electrician to install your Sense monitor.
