Smart plugs have a field under device settings called “What’s connected to this?” One of the options in this field is to select a natively detected device. Doing so in this field then hides that natively detected device. This wish list item requests that such hidden devices be included in hourly and daily .CSV exported files.
For people unfamiliar with hidden devices, I’ll give a little more background. Hidden devices avoid duplicate data, which is in general a good thing. Duplicated data makes the Other bubble artificially small. The Other bubble completely disappears if the sum of all bubbles exceeds the actual usage at any given moment. A missing Other bubble can be interpreted as measured devices in excess of 100% of actual usage. This obviously breaks certain mathematical rules.
In certain cases, I want to know how well a native detection compares to the integration. One example is my natural gas-powered hot water heater, which I put on a smart plug when Sense didn’t find it right away. Nearly a year later, Sense found it after all. Before removing the smart plug, I decided to confirm how accurate the native detection was. I found that the native detection misses nearly 50% of usage. Details are given in my previous post:
Therefore, I decided to leave the smart plug in place. Yet I know that Sense is continuously refining its native detection definitions, and a time might come when the data from it is good enough to remove the smart plug. For me to know how the native detection is performing, I must currently not hide the native device if I want to be able to see its results.
I checked with @JustinAtSense who confirmed that the data from hidden devices is still recorded behind the scenes. I could keep an eye on accuracy if that hidden data were exposed in data export.
I imagine that some people might be confused to see a device in their export file that doesn’t appear on their device list in the application. To avoid such confusion, hidden device(s) could be flagged somehow in the .CSV file. For example, place an asterisk next to the name. A line of text at the top of the file could explain what the asterisk means.