Sense found a device it called heater1. But I could not find it until I put a KASA on my fridge

Technical Questions
1

So the fridge has auto defrost. This thing kicks on at irregular times. It wasn’t evident. 300Watts!

I put the KASA on my fridge, and when the 300 watts were on. I looked at the refrigerator, yep it usually is 100 watts, but it was drawing 300. So now, Heater 1 becomes something else. Or can I combine it with the fridge?

What would you do?

2

Yeah so what Sense found was a heater… It was the defrost cycle which heats. You can combine it with the refrigerator if you wish. I think most people keep them apart just so they can see the difference between the two different usage amounts, but combining them won’t hurt if you would rather see it that way. In the future if you change your mind you can separate the two out again.

Personally, I don’t have a single combination in Sense. I prefer to label them accordingly. But we are all different and I use other home automation systems to store the data from Sense. I can then manipulate that data to see aggregate amounts however I wish.

Here’s the article which describes combining: https://help.sense.com/hc/en-us/articles/115011134287-How-to-merge-devices

3

I just installed Kasa on my refrigerator, and learned HEAT1 was my refrigerator too

4

All of this shows that we do not pay attention to some of the important things around us we need to. Just knowing what that 300watt heater is a big deal for me. It is the unknowns that really bug me.

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5

I discovered heat1 was actually the ice maker in my freezer. It has a heating element that loosens the cubes before it ejects them…

By raising the wire on the ice maker for a day and not seeing heat1 turn on in the app confirmed it.

6

The problem here, as I understand it, if you are using a SmartPlug on a fridge and Sense natively detects the defrost cycle, if you do NOT combine the 2 (or more), then the total energy is over estimated as the defrost cycle is counted twice. Natively and via Smartplug.

7

@Beachcomber - you have the idea right, but @bobfa and @sritodi will want to use this kind of “combine” instead:

The standard “merge” is for two native detections that live inside the same device. Smart plugs need a different “combine” when a detection happens.

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8

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