Renaming "Other"

#1

We have substantial evidence that a large portion of our “Other” category is a standalone electric heater we are using while one of our (three) air source heat pumps is broken. Unfortunately, the procedure for renaming devices does not apply to the “Other” category, at least apparently. I could be failing to understand how to do this.

Also, it seems the Sense categorization is fragmenting devices, the most flagrant being our air source heat pump hot water heater. In Summer, it uses heat pump only, but in late Winter, Spring and late Autumn, it has a hybrid mode where a combination of heat pump and straight electric heater are used. In deep Winter, I deliberately shut the heat pump functions off and go with straight electric.

I have worked with the Sense device classification for months now, trying to get it to align what I know is on our mains. I think at this point I’m punting on that, and will attempt to do my own quick-and-dirty time-based classification based on our home alone and the data series trace.

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#2

You are correct that the “other” category cannot be renamed. With the way it has multiple devices included that constantly change, renaming wouldn’t be much help if you are trying to isolate the heater.
You are also correct that using the timeline to identify your devices is a big help. I just named a “heat 2” to “hair dryer” by using the timeline for when then wife dried her hair and then verified the next day when she dried it again and I was watching both her and the timeline and saw the match.
Tracking down these devices is half the fun for me

#3

@samwooly1,

But how does one “grab” a device categorized within “Other” to pull it out to be its own device? I tried doing something with the trend, and could not grab anything. The heater has no separate existence beyond an increase in the “Other” bubble when consumption is viewed as devices.

  • Jan
#4

You can’t “pull” out of other, sense will hopefully figure it out and detect it. This is just part of it. We recootje device and wonder how sense doesn’t.
I have the same problem as you and even had a space heater do this. Sense did detect it as a heater and move it out of “other” after a week or so.

#5

Sense has had two months to try to figure this out.

#6

I’m also at 2 months (January 15th) and have many thing I think should have been figured out by now. It’s not a perfect science but if you read older posts you can see there have been big improvements made. The early sense users were lucky to get one or two in the first 60 days.
I understand the aggravation. I’ve been very vocal about how I didn’t think the marketing matches real world performance. But after spending a lot of time reading and interacting with people here on the community I’ve calmed down and learned to accept it for what it is. A little bit anyway. If you contact support and specify the device wattage and give them some on/off times for your heater, they will take a look for you.
Shoot them an email at support.sense.com and give them a few days to a week to respond. They can’t really force a detection but they can look at it on the back end.

#7

As noted prior, there is no way to do this. This has come up frequently on the forum and unfortunately there just isn’t a way to force Sense to learn devices at the moment. We hope to add some capability along these lines in the future, but it’s a significant challenge.

I recommend reading this thread for a bit more info: Why can't you train Sense?

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