Hue group not being detected

[linda]

We just installed our sense yesterday and the data is starting to come in. We even got our first device detection just over 24 hours in! Said it was the dryer which sounded reasonable except that it gave us a spurious on and then off notification around 7:25pm tonight but we’ll see how it goes.

What this post is about is the Hue integration.

We have a bunch of hue bulbs and for all but three rooms, the sense app grouped the bulbs by the room. When we turn on the family room lights we get a single bubble for all the lights. There are three rooms this doesn’t happen for. Two of those rooms only have single bulbs each so that might make sense there but one room, the kitchen, has 6 bulbs and they each show up individually even though they are grouped together in the kitchen in the Hue app.

The sense app won’t let me edit the location so I can’t manually join them. So, how do I get sense to notice these are all part o the same room?

Thanks!

[JustinAtSense]

Hi @linda! Welcome to the Sense Community, glad to hear you’re enjoying Sense so far.

@linda

We even got our first device detection just over 24 hours in! Said it was the dryer which sounded reasonable except that it gave us a spurious on and then off notification around 7:25pm tonight but we’ll see how it goes.

Sense should be able to improve on the detections as things continue cycling on/off - I would recommend giving the monitor some more time to learn your home before deleting any of the devices.

@linda

We have a bunch of hue bulbs and for all but three rooms, the sense app grouped the bulbs by the room. When we turn on the family room lights we get a single bubble for all the lights. There are three rooms this doesn’t happen for. Two of those rooms only have single bulbs each so that might make sense there but one room, the kitchen, has 6 bulbs and they each show up individually even though they are grouped together in the kitchen in the Hue app.

Just to make sure I understand correctly, I’ve added screenshots from my own homes Hue integration to understand what you’re seeing on your end. Below you’ll notice I have two “rooms” set-up in Hue - these translate to the Sense app as defined below.

I have 5 Hue Bulbs grouped into two separate rooms → my family room (2 lights) and bedroom (3 lights).

So, in Hue, this set-up looks like this.

In Sense, Hue lights are visible as shown below, reflecting how they’re organized in the Hue app.

If you can share screenshots of both of the screens I shared above, it would be helpful before I recommend a solution or route you to Support.

[linda]

Thanks, Ryan! I’m not too concerned with the individual device notifications yet as I’ve got a bigger fish to try that I hope to get to soon but the Hue light discrepancy from expected behavior jumped out at me and I figured I should reach out.

Here is a screenshot showing the kitchen lights on in the Hue app:

You can see the kitchen lights are on. This room has six Hue BR30 bulbs in the ceiling. Here is how the Sense app presents the same moment in time:

You can see the individual lights here instead of a single bubble for the group. My other rooms with multiple bulbs do show up as they do in your picture.

Does that clear things up?

[JustinAtSense]

Thanks, @linda. @RyanAtSense is on the Product team here at Sense now, I’ll be your main contact in the Community moving forward.

I would try disabling and enabling the Hue integration via Sense to see if this corrects the issue.
If not, please reach out to our support team (support@sense.com) so we can look into this as a potential bug.

[linda]

Sorry, Justin…somehow I morphed Justin into Ryan in my fingers.

I actually tried that yesterday but it didn’t make a difference. I’ve submitted a support ticket. Hopefully it’s an easy fix for them.

On the positive front, Sense has id’d two of our devices now, the dryer which definitely seems to be the dryer despite that one false positive and some false negatives and a pump that looks to be the well pump.

We’re hoping that this will help us get a handle on our energy usage. We just moved in here a couple f months ago. Our house is a bit of a hybrid…built in 1940 with an addition from 2009 and we think the original part of the house needs some help to make it more energy efficient. We’re planning an energy audit soon but hopefully sense will give us some quantitative data that will help with making decisions about just insulating or also replacing some equipment.

[JustinAtSense]

@linda

Sorry, Justin…somehow I morphed Justin into Ryan in my fingers.

No offense taken, we @RyanAtSense .

@linda

We’re hoping that this will help us get a handle on our energy usage. We just moved in here a couple f months ago. Our house is a bit of a hybrid…built in 1940 with an addition from 2009 and we think the original part of the house needs some help to make it more energy efficient. We’re planning an energy audit soon but hopefully sense will give us some quantitative data that will help with making decisions about just insulating or also replacing some equipment.

Are you currently using Solar? If not, check out Dedicated Circuit Monitoring, which allows you to use an extra pair of flex sensors to instantly identify up to 2 120V or 240V breakers in your panel. It’s a really great way to instantly identify some of those potential energy hogs you’re keeping an eye on.

You can read more about Flex Sensors and Dedicated Circuit Monitoring here:

@JustinAtSense

Sense gets flexible with Flex Add-on Sensors : With Flex Add-on Sensors, you can choose from several different connected devices including Generators , 400A split-service monitoring, solar or dedicated circuit monitoring.

[linda]

Thanks for the info! I didn’t electrocute myself the first time in the panel so adding another set of CT’s sounds doable.

We don’t have solar now but are considering it for the future. We need to work through this stuff and some water treatment stuff first. Even without the device id or the dedicated circuit monitor I’ve been able to see that the smaller heat pump uses about 2KW when running normally (the larger one in the addition doesn’t normally run in the winter thanks to a pellet stove). The problem is the small one runs pretty much continuously when it’s below 40F. We need to figure out how much of that is a leaky 1940 house and how much is a heat pump that needs some TLC or replacing. Even without device identification it’s been helpful to see what’s happening. A dedicated CT sounds like it would definitely help give us a better picture of that heat pump more quickly.

[linda]

Unfortunately, the interaction with support was not very helpful. The first response was instructions on how to manually merge the devices which isn’t possible for hue lights. The second response felt like a brush off:

Unfortunately, if the option to merge the device is not listed under its settings in the app then you will not be able to combine them all under one label. This sometimes happens with lighting systems since they vary so widely. Our team is constantly working on improving Sense and adding new features so keep an eye out for this in the future.

This isn’t a major problem but it is a bug. It doesn’t give me a good feeling about dealing with support in the future if it is necessary.

[kevin1]

Hi Linda,
I had some startup issues with Hue and Sense when the Hue capabilities were first connected with Sense (way back). Most of my issues came from trying to group bulbs into groups (in Hue) then into rooms in Apple HomeKit. Turns out the two apps would fight with one another over grouping, so I eventually had to fabricate a fake room to get the groups to work the way I wanted. In the process I got individual bulbs stranded as you are seeing in Sense. I did three things to correct:

1. Turned off the Hue integration in Sense, then left Sense app
2. Double checked my room assignments in the Hue App, and made a minor change (removed on light then added to room again), even if everything looked correct.
3. Turned the Hue integration back on in Sense.

[linda]

ThNks @kevin1. Alas, that made no difference.

[JustinAtSense]

@linda

Unfortunately, if the option to merge the device is not listed under its settings in the app then you will not be able to combine them all under one label. This sometimes happens with lighting systems since they vary so widely. Our team is constantly working on improving Sense and adding new features so keep an eye out for this in the future.

Thanks for sharing with me, @linda . I’m going to follow-up on your Support ticket just to make sure there’s nothing else we can do here.