Is your refrigerator running? Sense, a smart meter company, will use machine learning to tell you

The future of the smart home could be as simple as…saving some money on your energy bill.

While a traditional meter tracks the energy use of appliances in the home, smart-meter companies are using technology to improve the granularity and precision of that tracking, with the aim of benefitting both homeowners and utilities.

One such smart-meter provider is Sense, a Massachusetts-based firm founded in 2013. The company announced $105 million in Series C funding in late April, bringing its total funding to nearly $152 million.

Sense’s nine-figure funding round is further proof of the smart meter market’s rise. In the US, smart-meter penetration reached 65% in 2020, increasing at a rate of 4–5% every year since 2016, according to Guidehouse Insights data cited by Utility Dive.

• Utilities are helping drive the adoption of smart meters, with state regulators recently approving recent massive smart-meter rollouts in Virginia and New Jersey.

Smart meters themselves are not too different from traditional meters in the sense they capture and report back energy usage from appliances in a home, but the key difference is the interval at which they do it. Smart meters specialize in near real-time reporting to consumers, energy companies, and utilities to help determine which appliances are being used and how often.

• Sense CEO Mike Phillips said the company’s energy monitors can take millions of measurements per second, for example.

Sensing…sensing….

Sense’s Home Energy Monitor is a tiny orange box that connects to a standard electrical panel, which homeowners can install themselves or with the help of an electrician. From there, users can connect to a smartphone app, which gives an overlay of energy consumption throughout the house, along with labeling which appliance is consuming a specific amount of energy.

The Home Energy Monitor uses machine learning to distinguish between 30 different appliances at a time, getting as granular as identifying toasters and space heaters, though Phillips told us it’s unable to distinguish between smaller devices, like a phone charger.

“The way that a toaster uses power is really different from the way that a refrigerator [uses] power, which is different from the way the central heat uses power,” Phillips said. “By measuring the power in this very detailed way, we’re able to use machine learning to figure out what’s on and what’s off just from the power signal.”

The idea is that if a user sees something like the oven being left on, or a rarely used, but regularly plugged-in appliance siphoning off energy, homeowners can turn those appliances off or unplug them to reduce their energy consumption. Phillips said that active users of Sense can save between 9%–15% on their utility bills, but only half of Sense’s more than 100,000 users reach those savings.

• The DOE says the average homeowner uses 1,000 kWh/month and recommends homeowners use electricity during off-hours to save money from utilities using smart-meter programs, and also to reduce “always-on” appliances.

Smart meters can also help utilities manage distributed energy sources, like solar panels, battery storage, and EV-charging stations, by offering customers lower rates for energy consumption during off-peak hours, like in the middle of the night.

• Last month, the company partnered with Wisconsin utility Alliant Energy and strategic consultancy Cadmus to create a 500-household pilot project around the effect providing real-time energy insights to consumers would have on energy efficiency and demand response.

Looking ahead…Sense plans to use the funding to expand its operations and partnerships with home construction and smart-home companies like Landis+Gyr and Schneider Electric.

Correction: We updated this piece on May 9, 2022 to clarify that Sense does not have direct partnerships with utilities, as we had previously written. Sense works with Landis+Gyr, which has partnerships with utilities, like National Grid.