I’ve read the past “merge” posts but feel my specific questions didn’t get fully answered. For my electric stove, the oven and specific different sized burners have been found and I’ve confirmed them. First: If I merge them, now at the beginning of the month, will they show merged for this month or do I have to wait until next month? Second: if I merge them and decide to I merge them for any reason will the data also split back? Third: does merging order matter? Fourth: what are the pros & cons of merging or keep separate?
I think merging my electric stove makes sense however I want to keep my refrigerator separate. My stove is old and have aspirations of future going to natural gas or even dual gas/electric but no plans until this cheap, old one I found years ago dies but wife has other plans. Had not for COVID hit, was planning to replace it after new washer/dryer set due to old dryer dying back in February before lock down in my state. So want to just merge stove devices together.
Any insight appreciated! Going to keep separate until I get some community feedback!
A fridge light is perhaps the best example of Pros/Cons: If you merge the light and other fridge components you’ll loose the ability to set notifications based on the Fridge Light device and also the immediacy, in the Device stats of being able to see how many times the light was activated = number of times the fridge door has been opened!
Something to note here (and that could perhaps also be detailed in some refinements to the Sense support docs on merging) is that when you export data you’ll see that the .csv file will reflect the merged devices. i.e. the individual device data will not be listed. It seems that “regular” (unmerged) devices are given hexadecimal ID’s and merged ones use IDs starting with >“f” and <“m”? I believe this is so the order of devices vs “mains”/“solar”/“always_on” in the DeviceID field is kept clustered alphabetically. Hue light devices, for example, are given an ID starting with “z” (from what I understand) because they are a separate class of device.
I don’t merge components of a device in Sense - why ? Mainly because there’s not much to be gained, and merging can lead to confusion, especially if a component gets conflated. My main example is my AC system a couple of years ago - I have two ACs but about 4 AC devices showed up. I merged the devices that seemed to coincide with my upstairs and downstairs systems separatedly. But it turned out that some of the associations would change as the seasons changed, leaving me with a mess of merged data. Of course it was simple to unmerge, but because of the merge messiness, I missed seeing the conflation as early as I could have.