Best practices - merging devices

I’m finding that my sense is detecting various components of an appliance, ie: blower motor for furnace (moving air around) and exhaust motor (natural gas heat cycle) for furnace. Obviously the blower can be on without the heat cycle so should i be merging the device? To make things more interesting my sense found my fridge light (door open) and the fridge (compressor). Im concerned that merging devices might lose the aggregate nature of the data collected and the possibility to build useful alarms. So my question is ->> what do merged devices look like? Is it grouping two separate devices with unique data or does it just become a combined data set? If I merge the fridge with fridge light will i be able to tell how long a door was left open? Thanks

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Good point.

This has been discussed elsewhere in general under “grouping devices” and some of those posts answer part of your question regarding the look of a merge … and that you can unmerge.

I believe it’s probably still a future feature: namely a distinction between merging and grouping.

I have the same situation with my refrigerator. There are four detections for components. The compressor, fridge door light, ice/water dispenser and defrost.
I choose to keep them separate because I don’t want a notification or the usage to be combine for the door light, dispenser and compressor. I want the cycles of the compressor to be able to be tracked so I can see the actual running cost to keep things cold.
I also find it interesting how many times the door gets opened a month, about 700.

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I just installed a Wemo Insight on my refrigerator because it refused to be detected in any usable way … things like the light barely even register on the Wemo so thinking Sense would detect it natively while being clouded by 4kW water heater and so on was overly optimistic.

I’ve been prompted to action on the fridge because it’s noisier than it has been and about to go out of warranty in a month (after 3 years) and I figured it will help in discussions with Blomberg (BRFB1312) to get it quieter. In theory it’s a quieter fridge than most (and more expensive) but as far as I understand there’s nothing particularly extraordinary about it. I’ve done the basic stuff like checking for failed defrost, blocked drains and circulation fans.

I have the ability to do some networked sound recording and am tempted to get a side-by-side graph with watts/dB and maybe even shove a thermal camera in the kitchen and record that as well. I’m at least going to post something in the Devices database.

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