Installed the Sense a week ago and it discovered my HVAC. I’m in Florida and have a air-sourced heat pump located outside and a air handler to push the air around thru ducting in the garage. System also has emergency heat strips that only come on if the heat pump fails. Whenever the AC/Heat comes on, the air handler will turn on too. I also have my system circulate air periodically without the AC/Heat on.
So here’s the question, did Sense discover my heat pump AND air handler AND merge them together OR just discover the heat pump AND the air handler and is still to be discovered? Basically, does Sense automatically merge devices.
I don’t know whether Sense can automatically merge devices like this, but I suspect that it should not as you probably want to see the air handler and the external device (reversible compressor providing heating and cooling?) separately, so you can check both are behaving as expected.
Quick verification is to see what “HVAC” is drawing power-wise. If you expect the air handler fan to be say 1 kW steady, and sense is hitting that +/- a bit, that’s what it’s seeing.
If it’s a lot more than that, say 3kW plus, it’s including the heat pump. You should also be able to just switch the HVAC on in fan-only mode and watch what Sense shows for that event.
I’m betting the air system has yet to be discovered. Mine is invisible to Sense so far… simple test, turn the heat/cool such that the heat pump stays off, then turn the air system on and see if Sense reports it (with a smaller load). I’ll bet Sense will not pick it up. Both my fan and my resistance heat strips remain entwined with my “Other” loads.
my system picked up my HVAC air handler pretty quickly. As a 1 kw motor, it should be easier that something complicated like a washing machine.
however we have a whole house humidifier that of course can control the HVAC air handler and pretty soon the HVAC device started to include the power used by the heater in the humidifier (which is still in Other) or appear to switch off when in fact its power was being reflected in Other along with the Humidifier.
I deleted it in coordination with the fine Sense tech support guys and the HVAC reappeared as Heat 2. A work in progress and really told to explain the sort of things that could happen in detection of a compound system such as a system with an air hander and a heat pump.
We just have to give it time for the algorithms that steer the machine learning to mature. Our data is certainly hleping.
Sense does automatically merge components when it is confident that they belong to the same device, but in your situation, it’s more likely that the air handler is yet to be discovered. If you reach out to our technical support team (https://help.sense.com/hc/en-us/requests/new), they may be able to help answer that definitively!