Sense has found my dryer heating phase and it’s motor as two separate devices, I’ve named them dryer for the heating load and dryer motor. Should I combined them? What is the expected behavior when (if) I combined them?
I also have the same question around my boiler, it found the startup cycle (~90 seconds in runtime) a long time ago and recently found the heating cycle load. Should these be combined?
Will Sense see these individual loads as “subparts” of the entire device or try to see the loads “added together”?
And I think I just answered my own question on the Dryer, literally brand new behavior, now seeing Dryer ~2611w and now dryer motor @ ~5374w. Prior to this the motor has been consistently ~288w and see during the heating load and non-heating load. I’m thinking it should be combined, but still waiting to see what everyone thinks the expect behavior should be.
I’ve combined some devices and not others. It seems to be more of a personal preference, depending on how you want to view your devices and your energy usage.
IMO, it seems like it would be better to have overall totals (combined devices) to help budge your energy use, but maybe individual components would be better identifies of potential problems…
I would say it is indeed somewhat of a personal preference as merging the devices doesn’t make any sort of destructive changes on the backend. It really just changes how you see the components and their data.
That being said, we do recommend merging the devices in the scenarios that you mentioned. Once the devices are merged, their data will be aggregated into one device. That means usage statistics will be combined and when one of the component devices is ‘on’ the merged device will appear as ‘on’.
You can always unmerge devices, so if you’re unsure, I recommend giving it a try and unmerging if you prefer the devices separate.
The behavior reported, finding the motor and heat separately, makes sense (?!?!) and allows us to manage the display / stats as we see fit - keeping the backend data as heaters, motors, lights etc so you can manipulate in due course in some other way is no doubt a big advantage.
However will the system yet identify these compound appliances in one shot? Some are easier than others visually (washing machine looks a good candidate).
If I’m understanding your question correctly… it does depend on the device. Compound devices are more difficult to detect in one shot (as you might imagine) so component devices are often detected separately right now. But the more data Sense has that associates these component devices, the better Sense can detect them as one device. Keep in mind Sense does need to see a number of cycles of the device running to be able to identify it and that plays into when one component is detected vs another.
I have a related question. I’m fairly sure Sense is detecting my heat pump, when it runs as only a heat pump. However, when it kicks in the Aux Heat, then it simply calls it ‘Other’. As this is a larger user (naturally), and quite common in the current cold, it’d be great to get this/these identified as one device. I’m assuming there is no way to do this currently, but all ideas welcome.
Realizing that you mentioned this in another thread, Jeff, so this may be a duplicate answer for you, but… as Sense gathers more data and learns about your home, it should be able to recognize the other component of your heating system. Our data science team is constantly working to improve detection algorithms as well so that should help with identification in that regard.
There were two copies of this message in the Device Detection thread…not sure if you intended one of those to go to a different thread, but your message seems to indicate that.
Now, I’m wishing we could combine this data with Ecobee, as the Ecobee clearly shows both the Aux and the regular cycle. Would be much more useful for Sense to have both properly accounted for, so can track the cost (which is not small these cold days…).
Well, I saw Sense id’d a heater, and then was able to manually correlate the aux heat running with that ‘heater’, so I combined the devices. Now, it shows both the heat pump when running normally, and the heat pump when running with aux heat! Voila.