Overlay Usage Of Multiple Devices

Hi,

I would like to have the ability to overlay the usage of two devices in “Power Meter” mode to be able to correlate the on/off times b/w devices. This might help w/ device identification. For instance I have one device that was detected (AC2) but I don’t have 2 ACs in the house. Support is telling me that it is actually a motor, and I’ve seen it being on around the same time that my dryer is on (but not all the time). Right now my thinking is that this device gets triggered during a certain dryer cycle, but I’m not able to overlay energy usage of the two devices to confirm this. The Day/Week/Month is just not granular enough to do this kind of analysis.

18 Likes

Agree that that would be a useful precursor to merging (or not). For the short term, could you temporarily merge ? That at least give you away to overlay, though without seeing each separate. It’s undoable, so not harmful.

4 Likes

The ability to overlay two (or more) devices in one view with each device’s usage a different color on a chart would have been useful for me here.

3 Likes

The ability for device overlay would be very useful before merging devices. I have a dishwasher which I think has 3 or 4 devices that are associated with it. Determining that they only came on within the same time period (when the dishwasher was running) would be very helpful.

3 Likes

I was getting ready to make such a post about this. my dehumidifier randomly started being detected under a new device last November. so I have Dehumidifier and Dehumidifier 2. Before I merge the 2, I’d like to overlay the meters to see if Dehumidifier 2 is picking up parts of the cycle or something else entirely before it finally started accurately getting the dehumidifier again.

Right now it appears that I would have to take screenshots of the device meters on my phone (can’t see the meter for an individual device on the app), and overlay them in gimp or photoshop. but a feature like this built in would be nice.

@kevin1 this is kind of what I was referring to before. the market for this device is for people who don’t necessarily need the app to figure out everything for them, it just needs to give them access to the data and tools, at various skill levels, that enables them to do it themselves. hopefully as I figure out Python, more doors will open to me with api and so forth.

2 Likes

Bump, this would still be a very useful feature. Many times lately I have wanted to have a timeline view of when multiple devices were on/off in relation to each other without having to download a data export and process it myself.

It would be great for determining if related devices are being detected accurately (e.g. AC systems with many components).

4 Likes

Has this happened yet? If so, I can’t see how to do it. The lengths someone has to go through to compare two discovered devices is criminal - all it would be is a filter.

How are folks doing this manually? Even the export data feature doesn’t help, as it is restricted to hour or day statistics - so no time stamps of when a device powered on/off.

Sadly nothing like this has been implemented yet. :frowning_face:

I agree that this would be a helpful feature. I’m really struggling to better classify devices and it’s frustrating this feature isn’t already available. Is there a reason it hasn’t been already? And I’m sure it would be great feedback to Sense’s classification algorithms.

@gavin.m.peters, welcome to the forum. To answer your first question, there are at least 50 other unimplemented items in the Wishlist with more “likes” than this one. I can’t see how the visual overlay would directly help Sense’s algorithm though it might help indirectly by enabling the labeling of a few more devices in some households, which eventually feeds back to better crowd-sourced classification.

1 Like

@kevin1, this not only helps labeling but also correlating multiple devices running at once which may need to be merged.

@scorp508,
I agree that the overlay is great for humans for correlation. My point was that machine learning doesn’t need a visual graphical overlay to find the correlation. It only benefits when humans are able to to do additional identifications.

I’ll add a vote for this feature. I’ve been using a Kasa plug to help identify some of my mystery devices. For example, Sense has picked up on several “Fridge” devices in in my home, but i haven’t been able to tell which is which until plugging each one into the Kasa plug and comparing the daily power trends for the plug to my mystery devices. Now I can properly rename “Fridge 3” to the upright freezer in my garage, etc. I’ve also identified that “Heat 3” is some other component within the freezer. The best way for me to correlate these was by looking at the power trends for each device and comparing them to the power trend for the plug. Would’ve been so much easier if I could view them overlayed on the same axes.

I understand the challenges that Sense is trying to overcome, but device detection is pointless to the user if we can’t physically identify whats being detected. Hell, their slogan is " See What’s Up. Know What’s On." Knowing that “Heat 3” runs an average of 18x per month and uses 355 watts for an average run time of 10m 12s is an incredible amount of detail when I can’t even tell what the actual device is.

2 Likes

One workaround would be to use your Sense with Home Assistant server - Home Assistant can automatically integration with Sense and has a flexible UI that let’s your do this kinds of overlays (like below), etc.

More information on Home Assistant and Sense here: