Help unmerging devices

[MattL]

I recently got a notice that Sense had merged my Geospring hot water heater electric element with the dryer. When I look at the Geospring and go to the merged devices, it doesn’t show the dryer for me to deselect it. The dryer no longer shows at all which I guess is expected as it was merged into another device. When I run the dryer, the Geospring bubble shows up. How do I separate these 2 devices?

[kevin1]

Two things to try:

• Contact support@sense.com. They might be able to disassociates the two.
• If that does work, you can try deleting the auto-merged device and see if it comes back separately. If Sense does separate detections again, it will do some backfilling back in time. But there is also a chance it could auto-merge.

[MattL]

Sense said my only option was to delete the device, so now it will need to find the dryer and electric heating element side of our GeoSpring again. It seems a bit baffling that there isn’t an option to separate devices.

[kevin1]

@MattL, it’s baffling until you look at the underlying technology. You have to think of all the on and off transitions in your house as a bunch of points in a many-dimensional space. Some of the dimensions include per-leg power, phase, maybe some kind of measurement of switching speed. Sense detects devices by dividing up the points into well-defined groupings. Every once in a while two of these groupings might grow too close together and Sense combines all the points. Or they try a “better” dividing algorithm that combines the two.

More informed speculation on how Sense native detection works here:

How Sense does “Native Detection” Work ? - User Perspective

I’m just a user figuring these things out. I posted a few replies over the past couple days to community questions, then realized together, they tell a fuller story. Device Detection Taxonomy There are four different general technical types of device identifications in Sense-land. And there could be more in the future. Native Detections - for devices that have “clean” on and off transitions in the timeframe Sense is looking for (1/2 second transitions). Sense learns these on/off pairs as …

[MattL]

I don’t know… when 2 devices exist separately for 2 years and then get merged, it seems like a way to separate them again should exist.

[kevin1]

Unfortunately, your on / off transitions are just a bunch of points in space. Heating elements are easy to detect, but hard to discern from one another if they use roughly the same wattage and vary over time. Your points in space might have varied more than they did in the past or the device clustering might have changed ever so slightly so that the two different clusters ran together. It’s a messy affair if you look at some of Sense’s own screenshots.