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]

Thanks @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.

[DevOpsTodd]

I know this is a bit old… but has anyone found resolution for this. I have 1 group out of about 10 that is doing just as Linda is describing. It’s showing each light individually instead of the group of lights for just one room.

I did a little digging and I don’t see anything in the device group ID or anything strange about the single failing group. The ID is smack dab in the middle of all the ID’s and there’s nothing in the name with an off character or anything.

[DevOpsTodd]

@linda The following may work for you!

Tonight I was able to diagnose this issue and resolve it. The steps for resolution are not simple so I’ll lay them out with discovery first and then resolution.

Issue: It appears that when you have an orphaned group in the Hue Hub and you create a new group with the same name Sense will not recognize the group. I think this might also apply to duplicate names for zones and for entertainment areas as they use the same array format with a “type” key differentiating them. The reason you might have to do the discovery portion listed below, even if you chose the easy fix, is because you might not know you have an orphaned group. In my case there was no other group called “office” in the app. At one point I think I connected my computer to the lights to change the color of the lights based on the hero I was playing in a game. I think this group was also called office. For whatever reason it wasn’t showing in the app and the only way to find it was through the below discovery.

Discovery: In order to check this with your hub you’ll need to do the following:

• Find the IP Address of the Hue Hub. To do this go into the Hue app, click on settings and then the bridge, click the bridge once more and you should see the IP Address
• Open a browser on a computer and type the IP address of the hub followed by /debug/clip.html. The entire string should look like this if your hub was at 192.168.0.10 …
  192.168.0.10/debug/clip.html
• In the box URL remove everything except for /api
• In the box Message Body put the following:
  {"devicetype":"my_hue_app#debug testing"}
• Push the physical button on your hue hub
• Go back to the web browser and hit the POST button
• The output should be a command response with your userId assigned to the user we just created. COPY THIS ID as you will need it for future commands.
• In the URL box after /api put another “/” followed by the ID you just copied followed by “/groups”. The entire string will look like this (note the ID will be different for you):
  /api/1028d66426293e821ecfd9ef1a0731df/groups
• Remove all data from the Message Body box. It should be blank for the remainder of the commands.
• Press the GET Button

You will now see a list of all of the groups. Go through the list and look for a duplicate in the name field which immediate follows the group number. If you have duplicates continue to Resolution

Resolution:
The easy way - Create a new group with a different name and move the lights to the new group. Make sure that there’s no entertainment area or zone with the same name. If your duplicate groups are all visible in the app changing the name is the correct way and the easy way. If only one is in the app and the other is the orphaned rogue group, continue below.

The correct way - Remove the orphaned group as follows:

• Once you find the duplicate group look for the one that lists the lights array. This is the field where it has lights listed with numbers in the brackets as seen below.

"lights": [ 
             "1",
             "2"
 ],

• Now find the one that doesn’t have any lights. It’s the rogue group that’s causing an issue.
• Once you find the rogue group get the group number. Again that’s the number right above the name of the group and furthest to the left of the other fields.
• Go back up to the URL field and append the group to the end of the string that’s present. It should now look like this if FOR EXAMPLE your rogue group is #8:
  /api/1028d66426293e821ecfd9ef1a0731df/groups/8
• Again make sure you put your userId in between api and groups. Do not use the fake one I have above and do not use group 8 unless your rogue group happens to be 8. Use the correct information that was gathered above.
• Now press the DELETE button.

If for some reason you mess up, you’re only deleting a group. It won’t cause major issues, you can just re-create the deleted group if you delete the wrong one on accident. If you don’t put the group id before pushing delete you might just delete all the groups (I’m not willing to try). So just make sure you follow the steps above and you’ll be good.

You have removed the rogue group. Give Sense about 5-10 minutes and it will recognize the group change and fix the grouping issue.