Sense Home Energy Monitor

[Kentinada]

This may be beyond the scope of this forum but I wondered if anyone has any experience with the Sense Home Energy Monitor in their smart home?  

[dwengrovitz]

Not sure if you ever heard from anyone on this question ... but I would also be interested in hearing about experiences with this device. 

I see that there is a Nodeserver for SenseMonitoring in the Polyglot NodeServer store.  Might be kind of interesting to be able to have some integration with ISY when various devices are on or off in the house. 

[Kentinada]

I don't know anything about nodeservers but I can tell you my Sense has been running for about a month now.  It is still "learning" the electrical devices in my home but I like it.  I'm not sure it will save me any money in the long run but it's interesting to see how much electricity is being consumed and when.  If you had some old non-energy efficient appliances, it would surely make those obvious.  Let me know if you get one and you intergrate with your ISY somehow. 

[dwengrovitz]

I ordered one ... will let you know what I learn when trying to integrate it with my ISY.  

[funat120mph]

I have been using a Sense for almost a year now.  I love it.  Adding solar in a couple months.

I have tried the Sense NodeServer but haven't had any luck.  If anyone else is able to set up the Sense NodeServer some help would be appreciated.  I do have Rachio and WirelessTags NodeServers working.

[robl]

Just got the polisy unit today, installed sense energy from the nodeserver store via the ui and .... it doesn't easily work. Has anyone else gotten it to work?

• by default the log complains about missing libraries
• ssh to polisy for more details found that lots of python libraries are missing. the install.sh script attempts to install most? all? but runs into errors.
• latest one to give me grief is aiohttp python library. error message is cc (c complier) is not found on polisy.

Anyone know how to get the C compiler on polisy? I can't seem to find yum or apt-get on the polisy system. Is there some other command I need to use?

Ah - I see from the following post that universal devices is planning that no node servers need compilers, but that they weren't all properly checked. Does this mean that this sense nodeserver should get upgraded to no longer need cc?

Looks like the command to install thinks is "pkg install". I'm not familiar with it, and trying cc fails. (not found). Running "pkg search cc" also doesn't find the C compiler. Stuck. Any suggestions? @Michel Kohanim?

 

Looks like Total Connect (for thermostats) also has similar issues. I had to ssh to run its install.sh script, which loaded many missing dependencies, then failed on lxml.etree which also needs cc to compile.

Polisy is a great device, but needs more polish before non-technical people try to use it ...

Thanks!

[Bumbershoot]

1 minute ago, robl said:

Is there some other command I need to use?

Polisy is running FreeBSD and not Linux, so the package manager is 'pkg'.  I don't think there's a C compiler available in the UDI 'pkg' repositories. 

[Michel Kohanim]

Hi robl,

No compiler. What package do you need?

With kind regards,
Michel

[robl]

Hi Michel,

SenseMonitoring needs multidict, TotalConnect needs lxml.etree. Both may need additional python packages, it's failing for me at this step of the process running install.sh. If you're able to build all the node servers on a spare polisy, it would help tremendously too!

Rob

[Michel Kohanim]

@robl,

Will do!

With kind regards,

Michel

[robl]

Awesome - thank you! How will I know & get the libraries? Is it just checking for and installing updates from the Polisy web UI?

[Michel Kohanim]

@robl,

Please do:
sudo pkg install py37-aiohttp

With kind regards,
Michel

[robl]

Thank you!! It's installed now, on to the next step of configuring it.

[robl]

FYI, for others going down this route - it mostly works. A few notes:

• ssh to your polisy, go to the nodeserver dir for sense.
• sudo pkg install py37-aiohttp
• run install.sh and make sure it installs properly
• create custom parameters for email, password, and update_realtime. Not sure what update was supposed to be set to, I used 1 and nothing failed. I set it to 0 and no errors either. Email/password are what you use for the sense app on your phone/tablet.
• be patient, it creates drivers in ISY for all your sense devices. This can take a while. My ISY admin window hung when I attempted to ungroup the devices while it was updating. after I restarted the ISY admin window, all was good.
• for a little more info, look at the README.md file in the nodeserver dir.
• a query of a sense device or overview in ISY doesn't seem to do anything, you need to wait for the next poll. It'd be nice if this would force a poll on that device.

A few gotchas / issues:

• when trying to debug by looking at the log window in polisy, I found it wasn't updating properly. I had to refresh the web page to get the new lines. I finally resorted to tail -f on the log file.
• like other nodeservers in polisy, after the devices had been created, I found some were grouped, some were not. I did an ungroup and group and got them in 1 spot. Here's my sense screen below. The per-device screens are a bit different, but tell ongoing energy load and on/off, etc.
• from the logfile I see it's "updating all drivers to ISY" for each device about once a minute. Likely the short poll?
• I'm not sure all the data values are correct - perhaps units are off or it needs to run for a bit. Daily usage = 8 watts? I don't think so.  I'm usually about 33Kwh. But the current energy usage and current solar power look correct. 
• The BIG item for me is the current usage and solar power generation. I had an inverter failure and took a while to notice - now I can write ISY rules to look for a few days of 0's and to let me know.
• I found the overall numbers (sense device attributes) only update during long poll, which I made faster to every 5 minutes. Oops, later on this seems to be stuck again, not sure why.
• Sense has a lot of promise, but not sure the devices are that reliable. It find things, sometimes 3-4 times, and doesn't always mark them on or off. I don't think it too reliable for actions on devices on/offs, but perhaps that works better for you. Also there will be a delay as the nodeserver is polling sense for updates, as opposed to event notifications. This means a device could go on, but you won't know until the next polling interval. (default 1 min later)
• Watching the log file there are some unexpected things:
  • query, unable to retrieve Sense Monitor usage: 'Senseable' object has no attribute 'rate_limit'
  • ./sense_poly.py:71: ResourceWarning: unclosed <socket.socket fd=8, family=AddressFamily.AF_INET, type=SocketKind.SOCK_STREAM, proto=6, laddr=('192.168.x.x', 61651), raddr=('34.231.x.x', 443)>
  • updateDevice: API call timed out
• So far these errors or warnings don't seem to affect me, YMMV.

[Kajtek]

Hi

I see you have sensemonitoring. I installed the nodeserver created  custom parameters for email, password, and update_realtime. but it does not connect

My log files shows

2020-02-06 20:29:51,477 [MainThread] [INFO ] Received Config from STDIN.
2020-02-06 20:29:51,480 [MainThread] [INFO ] UDI Polyglot v2 Interface 2.0.34 Starting...
2020-02-06 20:29:51,484 [MainThread] [ERROR] Traceback (most recent call last):
2020-02-06 20:29:51,484 [MainThread] [ERROR] File "./sense_poly.py", line 13, in <module>
2020-02-06 20:29:51,486 [MainThread] [ERROR] from sense_energy import Senseable
2020-02-06 20:29:51,486 [MainThread] [ERROR] ModuleNotFoundError
2020-02-06 20:29:51,487 [MainThread] [ERROR] :
2020-02-06 20:29:51,487 [MainThread] [ERROR] No module named 'sense_energy'

I tried ssh but using putty and entering ip of polisy I am presented with Login as:

I enter  username that I use in polisy and then next line is

Using keyboard-interactive authentication.
Password for username@polisy:

The problem is that I cannot eneter my passwordf. It does not accept any entry. I can only press Enter, and it will say: Access denied

 

Could you help me and tell me what should I do

Andrzej

 

[Michel Kohanim]

@Kajtek,

The latest UDX package will install all the necessary packages including p37-aiohttp. To get into the polisy, please use admin/admin. Then do:

sudo pkg update
sudo pkg upgrade
sudo reboot

Once polisy reboots, it will install everything you need.

With kind regards,
Michel

[Kajtek]

Thank you but the problem I have is that I am not able to SSH polisy.

When I use PuTTY I am presented with Login:

I can type my user name or as you suggest admin it will display:

Using keyboard-interactive authentication.
Password for admin@polisy:

When I try to type password :admin or anything it does not respond at all.  It does not accept any entry The only keystroke it will accept is Enter and after that it will display Access Denied

[Kajtek]

Hi again

I was able to SSH with different client than Putty.

I executed

sudo pkg update
sudo pkg upgrade

and I could see downloading, upkacking and isnstalling procedures

Then I executed sudo reboot  and my polisy rebotted  beeping few times

I created three custom keys

email, password and update_realtime

I still however and cannot connect and the message in my log  shows

2020-02-07 17:03:51,343 [MainThread] [INFO ] UDI Polyglot v2 Interface 2.0.34 Starting...

2020-02-07 17:03:51,348 [MainThread] [ERROR] Traceback (most recent call last):

2020-02-07 17:03:51,349 [MainThread] [ERROR] File "./sense_poly.py", line 13, in <module>

2020-02-07 17:03:51,351 [MainThread] [ERROR] from sense_energy import Senseable

2020-02-07 17:03:51,352 [MainThread] [ERROR] ModuleNotFoundError

2020-02-07 17:03:51,353 [MainThread] [ERROR] :

2020-02-07 17:03:51,353 [MainThread] [ERROR] No module named 'sense_energy'

 

Andrzej

[Kajtek]

I have finally successfully installed  sense energy  node and all seems to work. There is one problem and I do not know if this is because the installation is not complete or this is just  a limitation and this option is not available at all

I cannot use the status of sense devise in my programs. It just does not show up in programing.

Other node servers like for example DarkSky  allows  me to use Darksky

For example I can use  Dark Sky Temp to write  If DarkSky Temperature >21.0 C then....

Sense does not show in programming at all

 

Andrzej

 

 

[Michel Kohanim]

@Kajtek,

I have submitted an issue.

With kind regards,
Michel

[Kentinada]

On 2/7/2020 at 12:31 PM, Michel Kohanim said:

@Kajtek,

The latest UDX package will install all the necessary packages including p37-aiohttp. To get into the polisy, please use admin/admin. Then do:

sudo pkg update
sudo pkg upgrade
sudo reboot

Once polisy reboots, it will install everything you need.

With kind regards,
Michel

Hi Michel, I just got my Polisy up and running this week. I have the Sense Monitoring system as well. I was considering connecting to it through the Polisy.  Do I still need to do this 3 sudo commands before installing the Sense polyglot? 

[Michel Kohanim]

@Kentinada,

No! Already included in all new shipments.

With kind regards,
Michel