How is auto-combining working for you?

Has anyone had Sense combine devices and be correct about it?
This has happened to me several times now and it is a terrible idea. Sense will take “heat 2” and “heat 5” and send me a notification that they are now combined. Sense doesn’t even know what the device is but feels confident about combining, really?
If Sense could tell that heat 2 was a stove element and heat 5 was an element adjacent to and on the same stove, I could see where it would think to combine. But even in that situation, I don’t want it combined. If I want that, I’ll merge them myself.
Either change combine to make it like “merge” where we can combine or separate them or do away with “combine” all together until Sense knows for a fact what the devices are.

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Yeah, I had a strange combine a week or so back - my dishwasher and toaster were combined into…“Toaster”.

Seemed rather…counterintuitive. My toaster was actually reading pretty accurately. Dishwasher, not so much, but the two together, well, yeah…ummmm.

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I haven’t had any automatic “combines” that I can remember, but if it’s not 100% accurate, it should absolutely have a manual OK that also let’s you decline and say why…

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I have’t heard reports of bad combines besides yours. [Removed. I was wrong. See below]

For anyone, if you feel you’ve had bad combines, bring it to Support. In some cases they can undo, but it’d be useful for us to know the perceived success. I’ve had a couple in my home and they seemed pretty solid, but @oshawapilot’s dishwasher/toaster is obviously no good.

Mine have always been renamed by me and combined after.
I’ve sent my feelings about combine several times and they haven’t done anything about it as far as reversal.
I believe renaming only prevents Sense from also renaming.
When combined, Sense combined my names with the devices.
I had named oven/stove 1 and the other heat 5???


Also made sure they were not marked as a fuess

Yup, I was wrong. It’s Monday and I haven’t made coffee so I’ll blame that :cold_sweat:

Renaming has no effect on auto-combination.

I’ll pass this along to the Product team. I did do a quick perusal of support tickets, and I’m only seeing 8 reports of bad combines, which is a pretty low number. Still, it’s obviously not an exhaustive accounting if people aren’t reporting every bad combine. Thus, I encourage everyone to report.

In the meantime, I’ll pass this along and speak with the DS team as well.

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Only eight tickets does sound low. But I wonder how many total “combinations” have happened?

I don’t see anyone else on the community mention them, like they don’t happen much.

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I can see this as being one of those “throw your hands in the air” scenarios for many people, hence perhaps the low number of reports on it.

It certainly is frustrating however, especially without any ability to undo it.

It’s actually not that easy to catch a combination.
It’s happened a few times for me but I’ve only managed a single screenshot.
With the “merge” feature for us, this seems as a ridiculously clumsy attempt at something similar.
If Sense doesn’t even know exactly what a device is, why try combining them?

Amusingly. It just happened to me. It combined my dryer and my oven.

You would think they would have something in place that examines the names of the devices.

I just had Sense combine part of my oven with my water heater. I posted about it in another thead, but I figured it would be good to post here to keep things on topic.

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The odd thing is though, that I still have an Oven 4 (though, I think this is to be expected. I think this is my new “water heater” but I also still have a water heater device.

The old water heater device has all the historical data. My water heater was detected on like my 3rd day of Sense, so I had lots of data for it. Now when the water heater comes on, Oven 4 is reported as being on. I don’t know yet if it will also come on if the oven is on.

It’s also unknown what will happen if I just delete Oven 4. I really won’t lose much from my oven detection (my various oven detections are a bit weird, which I posted about here) since Oven 4 was just a small part, but Sense then may need to completely redetect the water heater. Support didn’t offer any advice on this one way or another, but I’ll wait a bit to see if they say anything about that.

I submitted a ticket to support about this already. The support tech did say they are working on a feature to allow the user to accept the auto-combination, but also said they have a time-frame on when this may happen.

You would keep the oven 4 but now your water heater is considered part of it. When combined, it usually combines both of the names also

But the weird thing is that it didn’t really combine them. I still have 2 separate entries in my device list. It would be great if I could just delete Oven 4 and then the existing Water Heater detection would start working again but maybe that detection was migrated over to Oven 4? But why wasn’t the historical data also moved over?

I would just really like to know how the algorithm could possibly have thought these were the same device.

so You still have separate water heater and oven 4 in the “device” page?
On the trends page you’ll still have listing for each as in contains history for both before the combination.
There is also possible that hey have changed “combine” recently based on recent feedback.
@RyanAtSense might know if it’s been changed?

When it’s happened to me, I’ve had one device after.
Using you device names as an example, it would look like this:
Water heater
Oven 4
Your water heater and oven 4 have been combined.

Water heater/oven 4

Yes, this is correct. And Oven 4 is correctly detecting the water heater, but I discovered last night it would also trigger with the oven. So I had a few problems

  1. All the old historical data was still with the no longer working “water heater” device
  2. Because Oven 4 is a part of the oven that only comes on for a few seconds at a time after the oven reaches temperature, I’ll never be able to report a problem > device is not on
  3. The stats were all messed up because the historical data for oven 4 was oven 4. So things like average run time, watts, times on were all way wrong

I decided to delete Oven 4, which I did last night. I was hoping the water heater detection might just start working again, but it didn’t. So now I do not have a device for my water heater. My hope is that it will be detected again soon and I’ll merge the new detection with the “old” water heater device so that I have the historical data. Obviously there will be a gap in data from yesterday to whenever it gets detected again.

I can confirm that this is true. I’m not sure of a rollout timeframe, but we are fixing this.

I’m not sure what’s happening with your odd auto-combination. That sounds strange. I would encourage you to keep working with support.

You’ll more than likely get both back. A little patience will be required

I had another set of weird auto-combine issues today:

The top combination is fine, but those devices were already manually merged, so that’s interesting. The bottom two devices that were combined have nothing to do with each other and shouldn’t have been combined.

Make sure you report it to support so they can officially log it. IMO, the only things that should be auto combined are merged items. If Sense thinks two non-merged items are the same, it should merge them, not combine them.